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Runaway teacher charged with child abduction

British police on Wednesday charged Jeremy Forrest, the British teacher who ran away with a 15-year-old pupil, after he was extradited from France back to England.

Published: 11 October 2012 09:34 CEST
Runaway teacher charged with child abduction
Photo: Sussex Police

With a towel covering his head, Forrest was escorted from a plane at Gatwick airport after flying in from the southwestern French city of Bordeaux and led into a waiting police van.

Police in the southern county of Sussex confirmed he had been charged with child abduction.

Forrest, 30, a married maths teacher, disappeared last month with a 15-year-old girl from his school in Eastbourne in Sussex on the southeast English coast.

The pair left Britain by ferry on September 20th, triggering a Europe-wide hunt that resulted in them being picked up by police in Bordeaux on September 28th.

The teenager, who is afforded anonymity under British law, was repatriated the following day while Forrest was detained in Bordeaux to allow a French magistrate to consider an international arrest warrant issued by the British authorities.

A French court ruled last week that Forrest should be returned to Britain.    

Forrest did not contest the extradition at last week's hearing and, through his lawyer, has said he is keen for the "full story" of the elopement to be told.

"A 30-year-old man who was arrested for child abduction has been extradited from France and brought back to Sussex where he will be questioned by officers," a Sussex Police spokeswoman told AFP.

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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.