PARIS, Dec 17 (AFP) - Forty-three students in France have been expelled from their school after refusing to comply with a new law outlawing religious insignia such as Muslim headscarves in state-run educational institutions, officials said Friday.
Most of those ordered out of their classrooms were Muslim girls who refused to take off scarves hiding their hair in line with their Islamic faith, according to the French education ministry.
Three were Sikh boys who continued to wear turbans in defiance of the law, which came into effect in time for the start of the current school year in September.
The ministry said "one or two" more disciplinary hearings were scheduled for January, which may further raise the number of expulsions ordered.
A ministry official in charge of overseeing the implementation of the law, Hanifa Cherifi, said the number of students violating the provision -- designed to impose France's strict adherence to secularity in state institutions -- had stood at 639 at the beginning of classes in September.
They had turned up wearing headscarves, bandanas or turbans, she said.
But after up to four months of consultations and exhortations, 538 of them agreed to take off the offending headdress.
Another "41 enrolled in the CNED (an education-by-correspondence institute) and 17 in private establishments," many of the latter in neighbouring Belgium, which does not have a similar law, Cherifi said.
The 43 remaining did not take any of those options, she said, prompting the orders for them to be expelled.
12/17/2004 16:06 GMT - AFP