"Girl in the veil" barred from end-of-term school party

There was a bitter end to the school year for a 12-year-old girl in Arteixo, A Coruña, on Wednesday. Barred from classes for the past four months for wearing a hijab, the girl had gone to her public school to take part in the end-of-year party and receive her report cards. On arrival, she found the gates barred and was told by principal José Luis Fernández Pardo: "You are no longer a student at this center."

The girl moved to another school after she was excluded from the institution for wearing the hijab, which went against its rules that ban any form of headgear in classrooms - even though the hijab is accepted on Spanish national identity card photographs. The family of the minor will take legal action against Fernández for what their lawyer, Iván Jímenez-Arbay, termed "barbarity."

Jímenez-Arbay, a professor at Madrid's Autonomous University, believes this latest episode in the fractured education of the girl, in the sixth year of primary school, is the result of "personal vengeance" on the part of Fernández. "I don't believe the board of governors is on top of this, I can't conceive that all the rules of the game can be skipped."