PARIS, 19 December 2002 — Dallila Tahri says she hopes that the decision, just rendered by a special labor court, "will encourage other Muslim women to enter the workplace, and do so wearing their veils."

She had just been notified of the decision by the Prud’hommes labor court that the Teleperformance telemarketing firm that had fired her earlier this year had done so illegally and that it was being ordered to reinstate her within a week and reimburse her salary going back to August 2002.

Maitre Grumbach, her attorney, said that the decision was significant because it demonstrated eloquently that if Dallila was fired it was largely as a result of the "atmosphere of suspicion" in which French Muslim have had to live since Sept. 11, 2001.

"The Islamic veil had been largely accepted by companies before Sept. 11, but suddenly," he noted, "it was as if the attacks on the United States had allowed them to call all of that into question." He hopes, as does Tahri, that French companies will now no longer make it difficult for Muslim women to wear the veil at their places of work, indeed that they will make a greater effort at hiring them, for Sept. 11 has also seen French companies seemingly cringe at employing Muslim personnel.

Indeed, the salient point of Tahri’s defense was that her company knew full well that she would be wearing her headscarf to work as she had openly worn it to the employment interview during which the telemarketing company that employed her chose to offer her a job. But, noted her attorney, that was well before Sept. 11, "and since then," he notes "many companies now think it’s a major crisis when their employees choose to come to work wearing the Islamic veil."

Tahri’s offense was also, in her company’s eyes, that she refused to accept a new dress code which required Muslim women to wear the veil in the form of a turban, and not in its traditional presentation.

Said Tahri in speaking of the court’s decision, "it’s comforting because if I’ve won the case, it’s largely because what I did was protected by law, by the code du travail (the French labor code).

"In the future, other women in my situation will hopefully not shirk from wearing the veil at their place of work simply because an employer doesn’t like the idea. We expect that French law should now protect us."