Azerbaijan’s Hijab ban: Limits of rights

A recurring confrontation

Azerbaijan’s hijab restrictions assert the state’s authority over a decision as personal as what women and girls wear. The current controversy reopens a longstanding conflict that was never resolved. In November 2010, schools began excluding girls wearing headscarves following the education minister’s insistence on uniform requirements.¹ This enforcement subsequently eased, after the wave of protests² and arrests but the conflict implicitly continued. The topic became hot again, where new changes in administrative practice left pupils vulnerable to renewed exclusion.

The accompanying public narrative has also returned. Government-aligned media present uniforms as instruments of so-called equality, invoke secularism to justify exclusion, and portray opposition as foreign interference, particularly Iranian and Turkish influence. These arguments gained renewed prominence alongside the restrictions in 2026. Their selective deployment suggests that secularism functions as a justification for changing government policy rather than a consistent principle governing public education.³

The current sequence of events

July 2026 amendments to the General Education Law expanded the statutory framework for regulating school clothing. Cabinet Resolution No. 309 of 21 September prohibited pupils’ additional clothing elements deemed incompatible with uniformity or secular education. Resolution No. 325 of 6 October introduced clothing requirements for teachers, including conformity with secular education. While neither expressly prohibits the hijab, schools nevertheless enforced these provisions against pupils and teachers wearing it, triggering protests and solidarity initiatives.⁴ The authorities’ response to these protests has included arrests of parents and local residents as well as organized activists.

On 12 October, the Interior Ministry announced 37 detentions and a criminal investigation into alleged public-order offences. Higher figures circulated in subsequent reporting but remain independently unverified.⁵ Reported cases include a Nakhchivan taxi driver given twenty-five days’ administrative detention after posting about the restrictions on TikTok, parents detained after sharing videos of their children’s exclusion, and two brothers from Sharur reportedly sentenced to twenty-five days each after protesting their children’s treatment. Administrative sentences ranging from ten days to one month were also reported across several districts outside Baku.⁶ The response extended to educational solidarity as well. Ilkin Huseynov, who organized free teaching for excluded children, reportedly received thirty days’ administrative detention.⁷ Opposition activist Matanat Turan, detained on 13 October, was reportedly remanded for two months on 17 October after prosecutors challenged an initial house-arrest decision.⁸ These cases indicate that detention has extended beyond street demonstrations to online criticism, parental objections and practical support for excluded pupils.

The legal indeterminacy

Azerbaijan’s Constitution combines secular state education with guarantees of equality, education and freedom of conscience. It also requires restrictions on rights to be proportionate. Secularism cannot therefore be read in isolation from the constitutional protections it must coexist with. The state’s authority to regulate school clothing does not, by itself, establish the legality of excluding pupils from education.⁹

Under the European Convention on Human Rights, restrictions on religious manifestation must have an accessible and foreseeable legal basis, pursue a permitted aim and be necessary in a democratic society. Secularism is not an independent ground for restriction. The authorities must connect their measures to recognized purposes, such as protecting public order or others’ freedoms, and demonstrate proportionality. Exclusion also engages the right to education and the prohibition of discrimination, including where apparently neutral rules disproportionately disadvantage a religious group.¹⁰

The Azerbaijani measures raise two particular concerns. First, their open-ended references to uniformity and secular education leave considerable room for administrative interpretation. The absence of an express reference to the hijab does not automatically make a restriction unlawful. It does, however, require scrutiny of whether pupils and teachers could reasonably foresee the consequences, whether school authorities have power to impose exclusion, and what safeguards constrain their discretion. A duty to comply with clothing requirements cannot substitute for establishing the legal basis of the sanction imposed.¹¹ Second, the justification must address the seriousness of denying access to education. A pupil’s headscarf does not, without further explanation, establish a threat to secular teaching, school safety or other pupils’ freedoms. The authorities must explain why accommodating it would undermine those interests and why less restrictive measures would be inadequate. Where coercion is the concern, exclusion risks increasing a girl’s isolation and dependence. Children’s best interests and their own views must inform decisions affecting their education. Their access to compulsory schooling requires a separate assessment from teachers’ employment obligations.¹²

The case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case law nevertheless leaves governments substantial discretion. The Court has upheld a university headscarf restriction¹³ and rejected a challenge to a general prohibition on visible religious symbols in Flemish public secondary schools.¹⁴ It has also found a violation where a private citizen was excluded from a courtroom for wearing a hijab without threatening the proper conduct of proceedings.¹⁵ These outcomes provide neither an assured remedy for those excluded nor automatic validation of Azerbaijan’s measures, bringing  the question of indeterminacy of law to the foreground. The indeterminacy at stake concerns how the same legal principles can sustain competing accounts of freedom, equality and legitimate state power.

Beyond the ideology of rights

Against a background of legal indeterminacy and amid competing legal arguments, Strasbourg judgments and disputes over whose rights should prevail, a fundamental question remains: can human rights discourse adequately confront the forms of domination exposed by this ban? What is clear is that naming rights does not determine their content or resolve competing claims. For example, religious freedom supports inclusion, while equality, neutrality and others’ freedoms can be invoked to defend exclusion.[16] Proportionality returns the disagreement to judgments about harm, legitimate authority and acceptable burdens. The political choices that rights appear to resolve therefore re-emerge within their interpretation.[17]

This indeterminacy[18] of the law, however, does not make outcomes arbitrary. There is a clear logic to the decisions, but it does not lie in the so-called neutral legal language. Institutions consistently privilege particular interests and understandings of social order. Deference to national traditions of secularism can legitimize existing arrangements, while appeals to abstract freedom and equality leave unresolved whose interpretation should prevail. The impasse lies in expecting legal principles to provide a politically neutral answer to questions about how society should be organized. Some interpretations remain more defensible than others, but their defense requires political commitments that legal reasoning cannot supply on its own.

A further difficulty concerns the conception of freedom embedded in liberal rights ideology. Formal equality recognizes individuals as legal persons while leaving intact the relations that make them dependent and unequal.¹⁹ A girl may acquire legal recognition of her choice while remaining subject to administrative arbitrariness, economic dependence or coercion within her family. Securing an individual entitlement does not itself transform the relationships through which domination operates. The question is also who exercises authority over her life, how that authority is justified and whether she can effectively challenge it.

This requires scrutiny of both familial and institutional paternalism. When school authorities dictate a girl’s appearance in the name of emancipation, what distinguishes their claim to decide for her from a family’s insistence that she wear the hijab? The same scrutiny should extend to decisions about her friendships, movements and everyday associations. Why should a headscarf be treated as threatening while a prescribed uniform or hair ribbon appears neutral? Compulsory uniforms themselves warrant examination as practices of bodily discipline, with affinities to military ideals of standardization and obedience, rather than acceptance as self-evident educational necessities.²⁰

The political significance of this discipline extends beyond schooling. Regulating women’s bodies provides a means of enforcing particular understandings of national identity, public morality and political belonging. Women’s appearance becomes a visible battleground on which authorities demonstrate power through the language of protection or liberation. By defining acceptable appearance, they also establish distinctions between those who conform and those marked as threatening or disloyal. This capacity to produce divisions gives the policing of religious dress a wider political usefulness. Having exhausted its familiar catalogue of enemies, the Aliyev regime appears to be searching for new ones amid mounting socioeconomic pressures on Azerbaijanis. The hijab controversy offers a means of directing public frustration towards a newly suspect group. Polarization and scapegoating are well-worn instruments of entrenched dictatorship, turning grievances against those in power into antagonism among those they govern.

Resisting this politics of division requires immediate protection against repression and a broader project of collective emancipation. Rights can help reopen classrooms, defend detainees and support collective struggles. However, their practical value does not make them a sufficient account of emancipation. The question is also whether people can collectively shape the institutions and material conditions governing their lives. Freedom and equality must guide the organisation of education, work and community, including the capacity to challenge authority within each. A society organised around these principles remains possible. Building it requires a political imagination that reaches beyond securing liberal individual claims against those who govern towards transforming the relationships through which power is exercised.

NOTES

¹ Azadlıq Radiosu, “Hicablı şagirdlərin valideynləri məktəblərə çağırılıblar” [Parents of pupils wearing hijab summoned to schools], 23 November 2010.
² Meydan TV, “Hicab, məktəb və təbliğat maşını media” [Hijab, school and the media propaganda machine], 12 October 2026.
³ ibid (n. 2).
⁴ Republic of Azerbaijan, Law amending the Law on General Education, dated 7 July 2026, published 22 July 2026; Cabinet of Ministers, Resolution No. 309, 21 September 2026; Cabinet of Ministers, Resolution No. 325, requirements concerning teachers’ clothing in state general education institutions, 6 October 2026, especially paragraph 1.6.
⁵  Amnesty International, “Azerbaijan: Stop denying access to education through discriminatory hijab restrictions and release peaceful protesters,” 16 October 2026.
⁶ Meydan TV, “‘Leylini qoy məktəbə getsin’ təşəbbüsünün yaradıcısına 30 sutka həbs verildiyi bildirilir” [Founder of “Let Leyli Go to School” reportedly sentenced to thirty days’ detention], 16 October 2026.
⁷ Meydan TV, “Prokurorluğun protestindən sonra AXCP üzvü həbs edilib” [Popular Front Party member remanded following prosecution appeal], 19 October 2026.
⁸ Meydan TV, “Həbsdə olan inanclının həyat yoldaşı polis tərəfindən xəbərdarlıq aldığını deyir” [Wife of imprisoned religious activist reports police warning], 21 October 2026.
⁹ Constitution of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Articles 18(III), 25, 42, 48 and 71, particularly Article 42(II) on free and compulsory secondary education and Article 71(II) on proportionality.
¹⁰ European Convention on Human Rights, Articles 9 and 14, and Article 2 of Protocol No. 1. On indirect discrimination, see D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic [GC], application no. 57325/00, judgment of 13 November 2007, particularly paragraphs 175 and 184.
¹¹ Republic of Azerbaijan, Law amending the Law on General Education, dated 7 July 2026, published 22 July 2026, including the amendments to Article 12; Cabinet of Ministers, Resolution No. 309, 21 September 2026; and Resolution No. 325, 6 October 2026. On accessibility and foreseeability, see Leyla Şahin v. Turkey [GC], application no. 44774/98, judgment of 10 November 2005, paragraph 84.
¹² Constitution of Azerbaijan, Articles 42 and 71; European Convention, Article 9 and Article 2 of Protocol No. 1; Convention on the Rights of the Child, Articles 3(1), 12, 14 and 28. See also Leyla Şahin v. Turkey, paragraphs 154–162, on the assessment of restrictions on access to education.
¹³ Leyla Şahin v. Turkey [GC], application no. 44774/98, judgment of 10 November 2005, particularly paragraphs 104–123 and 154–162.
¹⁴ Mikyas and Others v. Belgium, application no. 50681/20, decision of 9 April 2024. The Article 9 complaint was declared manifestly ill-founded.
¹⁵ Lachiri v. Belgium, application no. 3413/09, judgment of 18 September 2018, particularly paragraphs 43–48. The Court distinguished the applicant’s position as a private citizen from that of a person exercising public functions.
¹⁶ Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018).
¹⁷ Duncan Kennedy, “The Critique of Rights in Critical Legal Studies,” in Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (eds), Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 178–227, especially pp. 195–197.
¹⁸  Martti Koskenniemi, “The Politics of International Law,” European Journal of International Law 1, no. 1 (1990), pp. 4–32, especially pp. 7–9; and “The Politics of International Law—20 Years Later,” European Journal of International Law 20, no. 1 (2009), pp. 7–19, especially pp. 8–12.
¹⁹ Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1844), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), pp. 146–174.
²⁰ Jasper Friedrich and Rachel K. Shanks, “‘The Prison of the Body’: School Uniforms between Discipline and Governmentality,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 44, no. 1 (2023), pp. 16–29.