Austria's Constitutional Court Rejects Petitions Against School Headscarf Ban

The Austrian Constitutional Court (Verfassungsgerichtshof, VfGH) dismissed individual applications filed by five girls aged nine to twelve and their parents who sought to halt a law banning Islamic headscarves for students under 14. The court held that the applicants were not directly affected because the regulation does not come into force until 1 September, making the claims inadmissible on procedural grounds. No substantive judgment on the ban's constitutionality was issued.

The headscarf prohibition, approved by Austria's parliament in December with support from the ÖVP, SPÖ, NEOS and FPÖ (the Greens voted against it), will impose warnings followed by administrative fines for violations. In the same decision, the court also rejected a separate petition concerning the seizure of mobile phones in asylum procedures for similar formal reasons, leaving the underlying legal questions unsettled.