Question 11943 — health establishments

Summary

Ms. Marie Mesmeur questions the Minister Delegate to the Prime Minister, responsible for equality between women and men and the fight against discrimination, about the practices of “cap hunting” within the public hospital, which are in reality discriminatory practices against Muslim women. On December 8, 2025, the newspaper Mediapart reported that a nurse from the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital had subject to dismissal for wearing a cap, a practice that is common and widespread within hospital establishments. Seven years of impeccable practice, accompanied by unanimously laudatory assessments ("highly appreciated by her colleagues, doctors, but also by management", "listening", "concerned about the quality of patient care"), will not have been enough to protect Madjouline from a real hunt for headgear, revealing a barely veiled Islamophobia. Indeed, Blandine Chauvel, elected representative of the Sud Santé union at Salpêtrière, indicates that the people targeted by these calls to order are, on a recurring basis, Muslim caregivers or perceived as such. According to his statements, hundreds of health professionals would be affected by such practices. For the only hospital in the Pitié-Salpêtrière, twenty similar cases have already been identified, among which nine caregivers have been dismissed. Concurring testimonies also report identical facts in Marseille, Lyon and even Rennes. If the principle of secularism imposes an obligation of neutrality on public service agents, this naturally concerns the prohibition of the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols. Gold the cap, little cap commonly worn in the operating room, cannot, by its nature, be assimilated either to a religious sign or to an ostentatious sign. In the same way that professionals wear caps in the catering sector, caregivers wear caps in the hospital sector, without this referring to any manifestation of religious proselytism. This was, among others, the case of Madjouline since 2018, which had not, until then, never been the subject of the slightest observation. Several members of the nursing staff also attest to having never been summoned by management to wear a cap. How can we explain such differential treatment, if not by a clear desire to discriminate against Muslim women or those perceived as such? As a reminder, article 1 of the Constitution states that France “ensures equality before the law for all citizens without distinction of religion. Furthermore, in a decision rendered in 2020, the Council of State affirmed that the mere wearing of a beard by a doctor cannot be considered, in itself, as the manifestation of a religious conviction. In this case, the management of the Saint-Denis hospital had demanded that a practitioner cut his beard, its length being deemed allegedly ostentatious. Even though successive Governments have had no continues to weaken the public hospital through budget cuts, that nearly 15,000 nursing positions remain vacant in hospitals according to the French Hospital Federation, Islamophobia undermines the hospital institution. A pediatric department even had to close beds following the dismissal of two caregivers for simply wearing a cap. Such a situation illustrates how racism constitutes a poison for society, as decisions based on astonishing reasons can produce extremely serious effects on the continuity of public service and more broadly on the population. “What a waste of time and energy!” Losing staff for such reasons is totally crazy,” deplore doctors at the hospital, rightly so. So, faced with this situation that is both ludicrous and profoundly unacceptable, she asks him what concrete answers it intends to provide so that healthcare workers are no longer threatened with dismissal because of their real or supposed religion.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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