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European arrest warrant for teacher who fled to France

A European Arrest Warrant has been issued for a married British teacher who ran away to France with a 15-year-old girl in his maths class, British police said on Thursday.

Published: 27 September 2012 15:51 CEST
European arrest warrant for teacher who fled to France
Photo: Sussex Police

Jeremy Forrest, 30, will be arrested over the abduction of Megan Stammers if he is caught on the continent, Sussex Police confirmed.

"That is correct," a spokeswoman for the force in southeast England told AFP, adding that more details would be revealed in a press conference later on Thursday.

Forrest and Stammers left Britain on a ferry from Dover to Calais a week ago and have not been seen since.

Stammers is thought to have gone with Forrest voluntarily and police do not believe she is "at risk", but they are seeking to reunite her with her family.

Her parents have made an emotional plea for her to return, while police have appealed to her maths teacher to "do the right thing" and bring her home.

Forrest, who plays in a rock band under the stage name Jeremy Ayre and is married to a 31-year-old woman, had hinted at a "moral dilemma" on his blog
four months ago.

France has open borders with Spain, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg under the Schengen Agreement, raising speculation that the pair may have moved on across the continent.

The age of sexual consent is 16 in Britain, but a relationship between Forrest and Stammers would not be against the law in France, where the age is 15.

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DISCRIMINATION

Muslim teacher wins €9,000 in Berlin discrimination case

The Muslim woman won an appeal before a Berlin-Brandenburg court on Thursday, and is set to receive nearly €9,000 after she was rejected from a teaching job due to her headscarf.

Published: 9 February 2017 16:27 CET
Muslim teacher wins €9,000 in Berlin discrimination case
File photo: DPA.

The Berlin-Brandenburg court on Thursday ruled on the side of the woman, who was denied a teaching job at a Berlin elementary school.

Head judge Renate Schaude said that the woman had been discriminated against and because her wearing a headscarf posed no danger to school peace, the discrimination against her was illegal. She was therefore awarded €8,680 in compensation.

She had lost her initial case last year as the Berlin school argued neutrality rules meant no one could wear religious symbols in schools.

But in 2015, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled that general bans on state school teachers wearing headscarves were unconstitutional – unless headscarves were found to “constitute a sufficiently specific danger of impairing the peace at school or the state's duty of neutrality.”

After this major ruling, some states had to revise their regulations – also because they gave preferential treatment to Christian symbols.

But the Berlin-Brandenburg court ruled that Berlin’s neutrality rules were still constitutional. This law states that police, teachers, and justice workers may not wear any religious apparel.

A court in Osnabrück last month ruled very differently than the Berlin-Brandenburg court. In that case, a Muslim woman in Lower Saxony was also not allowed to teach due to her headscarf in 2013. But despite the 2015 Constitutional Court ruling, the lower Osnabrück court said that the school had made a valid decision based on the legal basis at the time.