Muggle Laws

With the final Harry Potter book due for release this month, the normal hype surrounding the tales of the boy wizard is already permeating the press. However recent headlines about JK Rowling’s creation had something of a twist.

A born-again Christian South London teaching assistant brought a claim for religious discrimination after she refused to read Harry Potter with a child because the bible describes witchcraft as “an abomination”. The Claimant maintained that following the Harry Potter incident her religious beliefs were belittled and ridiculed by the school.

The teaching assistant told the Employment Tribunal “I do not believe that there can be such a thing as a mild form of witchcraft as the Holy Bible gives express instructions against some of the practices contained in the book and I therefore objected to the child reading this book to me. It would compromise my religious beliefs.”

Whether you think the Harry Potter phenomenon is over-hyped, derivative or a good fun story, there is no doubt that children want to read the books. Should a teaching assistant have the right to prevent them on the grounds of their personal religious beliefs?

The law says you cannot treat a person less favourably because of their religious or philosophical beliefs. So you can’t refuse to employ someone because they are Christian, Muslim, Jewish or any other religion.

The law also says that you also cannot impose any requirement that people of a certain religion or philosophical belief would have more difficulty complying with. An obvious example is requiring employees to work on Sundays, which devout Christians would not be able to do.

Proving this second type of discrimination is often more difficult in practice and has led to some high profile claims, such as the Muslim man required by Virgin Trains to trim his beard in line with their personal appearance policy and the female Muslim classroom assistant who was told not to wear a full-face veil. In both of those examples the employee lost their case as the employer’s behaviour was found to be justified.

So what happened to the Muggle teaching assistant? Perhaps unsurprisingly, she lost her case. The Tribunal found that she was entitled to refuse to listen to the pupil read the book, but should have told the child to read her another book instead. By raising this with the Claimant, the school had simply addressed “reasonable management concerns” about how she had dealt with the pupil.

Treating employees equally, regardless of their religious beliefs, and taking religious discrimination complaints seriously is key for any employer who wishes to avoid problems with the religious discrimination laws.

Published 11/07/2007. The author of this article is Holly Cudbill