The Berlin branch of the Greens party has introduced a motion in the city’s House of Representatives to abolish the Neutrality Act, a 2005 law that prohibits civil servants from wearing visible religious symbols, including headscarves.
According to the Greens, the law “hinders the access of women who have chosen to wear a headscarf to professions in the public service and in some cases makes this impossible.” They argue that the current regulation unfairly targets Muslim women and obstructs their careers in sectors such as education, law enforcement, and the judiciary.
“Highly qualified women are not allowed to practice their profession because they wear a headscarf. That is a problem,” said Green Party politician Tuba Bozkurt, describing the law as a “de facto professional ban.”
In 2015, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that a blanket ban on headscarves was unconstitutional unless it could be proven that the religious symbol posed a “threat to school peace or state neutrality.” Despite this, Berlin’s education administration only began complying in 2023, years after a Muslim teacher was awarded €5,200 in compensation in 2018 under the General Equal Treatment Act for being denied a job due to her headscarf.
This case prompted the Berlin Senate Administration to instruct schools to stop applying the Neutrality Act “literally” and instead follow the Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling. However, ambiguity remains over what constitutes a disruption to “school peace.”
Despite the Greens’ push for repeal, change appears unlikely under the current political alignment. The centrist CDU and left-wing SPD, which are set to govern together in the new government coalition, have no plans to eliminate the law. Their coalition agreement, still pending finalization, proposes merely reworking the law “in a court-proof manner to reflect the current case law of the Federal Constitutional Court.”
