Last Friday, Austria's Constitutional Court issued two important decisions. It held it unconstitutional to prohibit assisting suicide. According to the Court's press release:
At the request of several people affected, including two seriously ill people, the Constitutional Court (VfGH) repealed the provision that makes assisting suicide a criminal offense:
The phrase “or help him” in Section 78 of the Criminal Code is unconstitutional. It violates the right to self-determination, because this fact forbids any kind of assistance under any circumstances.
The Court also struck down the ban on young school girls wearing religious head coverings. Its press release said in part:
Pursuant to Section 43a, Paragraph 1, Clause 1 of the School Education Act, schoolchildren are prohibited from wearing ideologically or religiously influenced clothing that involves covering their heads until the end of the school year in which they turn 10.
Two children and their parents opposed this regulation. The children are raised religiously in the sense of the Sunni or Shiite legal school of Islam. You see in this provision, which is ultimately aimed at the Islamic headscarf (hijab), a disproportionate interference with the right to religious freedom and religious child-rearing.
With the decision announced today, the Constitutional Court (VfGH) has repealed this "headscarf ban" as unconstitutional....
A regulation that selectively picks out a certain religious or ideological conviction by deliberately privileging or disadvantaging such a belief requires a special objective justification with regard to the requirement of religious and ideological neutrality.
AFP reported on the headscarf decision. [Thanks to Scott Mange for the lead.]
