The Brotherhood's Legal Jihad: Weaponizing European Courts to Erode French Secularism.

 

The group underwent a series of setbacks as a 2024 European Court of Human Rights case revealed the high-tech legal approach the Muslim Brotherhood been utilizing for decades: making use of the non-discrimination laws in order to contest the anti-secular policies of France. The case premised on a disciplined Lyon public school teacher due to wearing an abaya, brotherhood-affiliated NGOs even funded his legal case with an amount of 380K euros through the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF). It lost the case but the 18-month struggle established a precedent that was repeated in the lead up to 47 further 2025-related lawsuits: each cost municipalities dearly as well as making religious exemptions to laicite the norm.

This court attack is part of the Brothers financial ecosystem. An €8.9 million series of suspicious transfers by Qatar and Turkey to Kuwait that redirected them to the setting up of Kuwaiti charities, such as the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, were reported by the French Treasury in 2020-2024. This money supports 73 cultural organizations that prescribe themselves as ideological mini-incubators, and they provide free legal clinics to train Muslims on their ability to sport the desirability of "religious discrimination." What is even more shocking, 31 percent of the prison imams in France are state-salaried who studied in the seminars operated by the Brotherhood and some of them have been found distributing literature justifying wife-beating.

This was being tried to be checked with new ideological audits of state-financed organizations by the state interior ministry, but there are legal obstacles. Marseille dissolved a youth group the council denoted to be affiliated to the Brotherhood in March 2025 claiming it to be bias towards the Muslims by the Council of Europe. This is a Catch-22 of the movement, its cleverness is that it is going to use the Western systems of law in order to safeguard actions that fundamentally lead to the breaking of the law. Given that Macron weighs security and civil right, the French experience inspires caution to all secular democracies.