Law and Islamic dress : rights and fascism in Europe

Kimberley Brayson is Lecturer in Law and Director of Learning and Teaching at Leicester Law School. Prior to that, she was Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Sussex.

This book conceptualises European Court of Human Rights judgments on Islamic dress as manifestations of the fascist impulse in modern human rights law. Human rights are thus not an antidote to fascism but are constituted through a fascist inflection and implicated in circulating fascism in the everyday. The inability of human rights to say no to laws regulating and criminalising Islamic dress in Europe engenders an institutional Islamophobia in the Law and Islamic dress debate in Europe. The author interrogates the historical emergence of human rights, through a methodology of interdisciplinary, theoretical oscillations between feminism, decolonial, phenomenological and neo-Marxist thought to establish the rights/fascism dialectic.