The Conseil d'État eventually ruled that students could not be refused admission simply for wearing headscarves, but it also gave teachers and principals the power to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether such signs of religious affiliation were permissible.
[...]
In 2003, [...] two teenage sisters [...] were expelled from their high school [...] for refusing to take off their headscarves. The Lévy sisters are the daughters of a lawyer who considers himself "a Jew without God" and a Kabyle teacher who had been baptized a Catholic during the Algerian war. The girls had converted to Islam after their parents' separation and had donned the scarves as part of that process. In an interview with Le Monde, the girls' father declared, "I am not in favor of the headscarf, but I defend the right of my children to go to school. In the course of this business I've discovered the hysterical madness of certain ayatollahs of secularism who have lost all their common sense."