The court's conclusion stated that the bride misled the groom by saying she was a virgin. In this particular marriage, the girl's virginity was a necessary condition. The religious undertone in this case, according to many, is obvious.
Human rights activists immediately declared in unison that such a verdict erases decades of women's struggle for their rights and all the progress made in this regard. Marriage has been reduced to the level of a commercial transaction in which a husband can easily reject a product called 'woman', claiming that a defect has been found in the 'item'.
This episode is particularly painful for France because the government of this country has been pursuing a policy of vigorously promoting 'secularism' for quite some time: in a country with a population of 64 million, there are 5 million Muslims – the largest Muslim community in Europe.
In 2004, France passed a law banning the wearing of headscarves and other religious symbols in schools, which sparked a storm of protests in the Muslim world. Now analysts predict the adoption of a new law that would protect the rights of women who are not virgins when entering marriage and free them from the humiliating need to prove their virginity.
Meanwhile, Article 180 of the French Civil Code states: if one spouse misled the other about their 'important qualities' when entering marriage, the other party has the right to demand annulment of the marriage. According to Xavier Labbé, the lawyer of the young man who decided to annul the marriage, the key words here are 'misled', that is, lied. 'Note that in the court's decision there are no words "Muslim", "religion", or "custom",' the lawyer says. 'It's not that the girl was not a virgin, but that she lied.'
The lawyer does not say a word about the fact that the girl might have lied precisely because she feared the traditional harsh approach adopted among her co-religionists – what happened happened, and the law in this case is not on the girl's side.