Italy: not in our country

In Italy, the populist right Lega’s celebration of Women’s Day in 2024 was the first step in the electoral campaign for the European Parliament elections. On that day, an outgoing European Member of Parliament affixed 200 large posters in Rome, featuring the image of a woman wearing a niqab and the wording ‘In Europe you have the same rights as your husband’ in Italian and Arabic.Footnote ²⁷ As far back as 2016, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Lega, combined Islamophobic claims with the issue of women’s rights in a Facebook post: ‘Islam seeks to impose not only a religion but a way of life! Where I live, women have the same rights as men’.Footnote ²⁸ In an interview with Il Giornale, a conservative newspaper, in 2018, he maintained that ‘as a father I recall school-related occasions when [foreign] mothers have been prevented from learning Italian and working, as well as girls who are forbidden to go to the gym or go to birthday parties together with their male classmates’, and concluded that ‘a certain kind of Islam is incompatible with our society’.Footnote ²⁹

In the summer of 2023, the Lega’s Mayor of Monfalcone, a town on the Veneto Adriatic coast, denied women wearing the so-called ‘burkini’ access to beaches. She stated: ‘those who come from far away are obliged to respect Italian rules and customs. Forms of “Islamisation” of our territory cannot be accepted; [these practices] evoke a fundamentalist vision, which is also part of the desire not to respect the rules and regulations of the countries of arrival’.Footnote ³⁰ In July 2023, a pool party organised by an association of Muslim women and reserved for them in a small village in Lombardy was cancelled due to harsh attacks against what was labelled ‘gender segregation’ by the Lega.Footnote ³¹

The same claims are shared by Giorgia Meloni, Italian Prime Minister, founder of the populist right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia. ‘The Islamic veil does not represent at all European values’, Meloni affirmed, commenting on the testimonial image of the EU campaign for the 2022 European Year of Youth, a young woman wearing the hijab. ‘After centuries of struggles, in Europe women are free from submission symbols …’.Footnote ³² Back in 2007 a prominent representative of Fratelli d’Italia (at the time a member of a different right-wing party) had presented a bill to outlaw the burqa and niqab, and similar bills have been proposed over the years.Footnote ³³

Traditionally, however, neither the Lega nor Fratelli d’Italia support progressive legal and policy measures designed to promote gender quality and women’s empowerment,Footnote ³⁴ not to mention their anti-abortion stances.Footnote ³⁵ And indeed, ‘Islam makes children while the West does abortions’ was a title in a newspaper very close to the Lega.Footnote ³⁶ The same rhetoric can be found in the parties’ campaigns against medically assisted procreation and the possibility of carrying out stem cell research.Footnote ³⁷ The Italian case is a typical example of what Scrinzi names ‘racialisation of sexism’.Footnote ³⁸

Gender equality as a fait accompli in Scandinavian countries

What has been observed concerning the Northern European populist radical right parties and movements perfectly fits the Italian case, that is to say, ‘those parties resort to a discursive over-simplification that posit gender equality as a fait accompli within Swedish and Finnish societies’. Italian society can be added here, as can many other European societies, in the image those parties and movements seek to promote in their political agenda: ‘… consequently [they] disregard feminist mobilisation to push gender equality beyond its present stage’.Footnote ³⁹ Depicting, in their public narrative, the condition of Muslim women as the victims of a backward form of patriarchy thus serves a double purpose. On the one hand it politically legitimises opposition to further gender-equality measures and responds to demands for gender conservatism. On the other hand, it provides the justification, paradoxically, for anti-immigration measures in the name of equality and liberal rights.

In Finland, political science research has shown that the Perussuomalaiset/Sannfinländarna (Finns Party) not only held highly gendered anti-immigration stances, as they preached for the protection of Finnish women from the violence of migrant (and especially Muslim) men. They also adopted a highly stereotyped view of migrant women, considered to be in need of help and support to cope with the barriers erected by their own culture.Footnote ⁴⁰ Interestingly, such rhetoric is to be found in the approach embraced by law-makers and policy-makers, whereby legal and policy instruments for migration governance target migrant women as an undifferentiated category. Special measures, therefore, were introduced to enable them to reconcile work and family and enter the labour market, on the basis of a cultural, oversimplified and stigmatised perspective rather than a socio-economic one. This is the result of the Finns Party’s success in setting the agenda on migration and integration, scholars argue:Footnote ⁴¹ ‘the focus was less about tangible support, but more to exploit the pejorative symbol of “immigrant women”; its instrumental value was to differentiate them from majority women’.Footnote ⁴²

A new way of making politics with gender in Germany

The German case is paradigmatic in depicting populist radical right parties and movements as a ‘new way of making politics with gender’.Footnote ⁴³ Over the years, the Alternative for Germany has built a robust and coherent political agenda in defence of the traditional family based on heterosexual marriage. ‘Freedom of choice for motherhood’ would increase the birth rate of the native population, in opposition to emancipative actions and institutions.Footnote ⁴⁴ Since the sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in Cologne (2015/2016), a new narrative has emerged linking gender, women’s rights, migration and Islam. This new narrative is based on two complementary assumptions: first, that migrant males are the perpetrators of gender violence because of their brutal cultural backwardness and because they are legitimised to do so by their religion.Footnote ⁴⁵ Second, ‘the equal rights of women and men guaranteed by the Basic Law as well as the free development of personality are contradicted by the headscarf as a religious-political sign of the subordination of Muslim women to men’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The logical consequences of such a stance are: (i) the reduction of the very diverse group of foreigners to a single category, i.e. radical Muslims; (ii) the attribution to immigrants of violent, misogynistic attitudes that justify the fear; (iii) the stereotyping of oppressed, non-integrated migrant women; and (iv) the assertion that integration is impossible because migrants belong to an antagonistic culture, incompatible with Germany. Furthermore, as scholars have highlighted in the case of populist radical right movements in Nordic countries, the gendered anti-immigration discourse allows the Alternative for Germany to convey the idea of gender injustice towards immigrants, and reconcile its traditional definition of family, gender roles, marriage and sexuality with a meta principle of acquired gender equality in contemporary German society.Footnote ⁴⁷

The Netherlands: trailblazer and outlier

In the Netherlands, the picture is somewhat different. There, in the second half of the 1990s, Pim Fortuyn founded a far-right political movement with a strong anti-immigration characterisation, based on the claim that Islam was a ‘backward culture’, especially in view of its anti-homosexual positions. In this country, unlike in other European contexts, the populist right-wing movement has not supported the conservative stance of other populist radical right parties as regards traditional gender roles, but has adopted a rather liberal sexual attitude,Footnote ⁴⁸ making anti-immigration rhetoric based on cultural bias somehow less paradoxical. The issue of gender inequality as a marker of migrants’ ‘otherness’ has become central to right-wing populist Dutch parties and movements, so it came as no surprise when in 2013 the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) issued a report on ‘Violence against women in Islam’, urging Muslim women ‘to liberate themselves from the prison of Islamic violence and choose freedom’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Dutch Freedom Party’s leader Geert Wilders has adopted a very radical position against Islam and has had to face a number of court cases, accused of hate speech and defamation.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Wilders’ and the Dutch Freedom Party’s political agenda, the typical radical right anti-immigration stance has systematically taken the form of a gendered anti-Muslim policy and legal intervention.Footnote ⁵¹ As will be discussed in the sections below, both anti-immigration and gendered Islamophobic views are reflected in Dutch legal and policy provisions: the tightening of legal immigration channels and restriction of migrants’ rights on the one hand, and on the other hand the tendency to make women a focus of cultural clashes, especially in the field of civic integration programmes and tests.

In the name of native women’s protection: Hungary and Poland

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the cases of Hungary and Poland best exemplify the justification of anti-immigration claims in the name of native women’s protection. Both Hungarian and Polish policy-makers exploit the issue of women’s rights not for emancipatory purposes, but rather coherently with a patriarchal rhetorical framework.Footnote ⁵²

Fidesz, the ruling populist party led by Viktor Orban, in government in Hungary since 2010, has held marked conservative, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim stances ever since its foundation in the late 1980s. There is hardly any need to retrace Orban’s positions on this subject, or to bring up Fidesz’s ‘anti-gender’ and conservative visions on family and women’s role in society, or homophobic attitudes and policies.Footnote ⁵³ The apparent inconsistency between the political discourse on migration and on women’s empowerment as ‘Western value’ and practices is thus less noticeable than in other countries. Nonetheless, to enact radical anti-immigration legislation and policies, Fidesz and the Hungarian government utilise the patriarchal, oppressive, and hyper-sexualised image of aliens, and especially of Muslim migrants, always depicted as a danger for public security and perpetrators of sexual assaults.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such an image has an obvious corollary: the need to protect Hungarian women against the threat of male migrants. In a debate on the sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, the State Secretary for Family and Youth Affairs maintained: ‘[w]e must put an end to illegal migration’ because ‘Hungarian women and children cannot be subjected to this danger’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even more explicitly, in a parliamentary debate in November 2017, Orban asked the opposition to ‘help the government so we can protect Hungary and Europe from migration, and this way we can do the most to combat violence against women’.Footnote ⁵⁶

In Poland, anti-immigration and Islamophobic claims intertwine with traditional Catholic values. The right-wing ideologically conservative populist Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice Party), in power from 2015 to 2023, stands for traditional gender roles, leaning towards a Catholic understanding of the family, and strongly opposing so-called ‘gender ideology’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Under its government, Poland saw the withdrawal of funding for in-vitro fertilisation, restriction of access to emergency contraception and a reduction in funding for combating domestic abuse.Footnote ⁵⁸ Its leaders have been making a systematic use of the perceived Islamic threat to build consensus in electoral campaigns since 2015. Jarosław Kaczyński, the Law and Justice Party leader, incited Poles to fear Muslim migrants ‘seeking to impose Sharia laws, using Catholic churches as toilets, and carrying diseases’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In a Facebook video for the 2018 local election campaign, the same party offered a dystopian vision of Poland in 2020 being flooded by violent immigrants who would perpetrate sexual crimes.Footnote ⁶⁰ In a similar YouTube spot, the Law and Justice Party contended that ‘Polish women have the right to security, … to dignity, … to dress whichever way they want to, and … to go to the streets without the feeling of being threatened in any way’. According to scholars, ‘the given framing creates a sense of “us” and “them”: Polish women (“us-victims”) are threatened by radicalized Muslim immigrants (“them-oppressors”) and can only be protected by the Polish government (“us-people”)’.Footnote ⁶¹

Each populist radical right party and movement adapts its claims according to the specific national context, but the common narrative, as discussed, focuses on women’s rights – of both migrant and native women – as the locus for anti-immigration and Islamophobic stances. In the past two decades these stances have permeated the political debate throughout Europe, resulting in a legal framework that has narrowed the legal channels for immigration, restricted migrants’ rights and tended to undermine the very notion of the rule of law and of rights as a source of empowerment.

A fragmented and unstable legal framework

First, the fact that migration law is one of the more contested political arenas in the last few decades implies the creation of a setting where the rules of the game are constantly changing. Italy is a paradigmatic example: since 2018, 20 new pieces of legislation have been approved to amend immigration law;Footnote ⁶⁶ they have quite often been preceded by government decrees, further modified in the process of being converted into acts of Parliament, and a number of which also provide for temporary regulatory measures that may be changed without a formal amendment. In addition, the courts have been busy striking out provisionsFootnote ⁶⁷ or providing new interpretations of the law.Footnote ⁶⁸

The same complexity, inconsistency and rapid evolution is also apparent in the legal frameworks of other EU member states, even though this evolution has occurred at a slower pace.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Germany, for example, more than ten amendments and new regulations were issued from 2015 to 2018, making it difficult to mobilise against the legal framework (either to demand more restrictive or more liberal measures).Footnote ⁷⁰ Needless to say, understanding the exact legal framework in such an ever-changing context is challenging and navigating through it is difficult not only for migrants, but also for all stakeholders involved in migration governance and for native citizens, who ultimately struggle to understand what is happening. This increases their suspicions and fears. It is not exclusively a theoretical legal problem when the predictability of the law is jeopardised ab initio. The uncertainty that has characterised the phenomenon of migration in Europe in the past two decadesFootnote ⁷¹ is at once a cause and an effect of the generalised migrant threat that populist radical right parties and movements invoke in their anti-immigration rhetoric.

Regulating migration through atypical acts

A second, salient, element of migration law is the predominance of secondary legislation (by-laws, regulations, ministerial circulars, administrative rules, etc) over acts of primary legislation.Footnote ⁷² This trend is evident across European countries, where governments frequently bypass ordinary legislation and resort to decrees or other informal measures, such as communications, standard operating procedures, and circulars, thereby sidelining parliamentary oversight. A good example is Poland, where a plethora of secondary regulations, ranging from administrative regulations to simple internal border office rules, have been issued to manage the Belarussian and Polish border.Footnote ⁷³

A similar trend may be seen in Italy, where the secondary role of Parliament in crucial decisions is a fait accompli. In December 2018, Salvini, at that time Minister of the Interior, promoted his new political course through a series of messages posted on social media stating that ‘Italian ports are closed’. A ‘code of conduct for non-governmental organisations operating in the rescue of migrants at sea’, issued in December 2017 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in consultation with the European Commission, further echoed this type of policy approach. The code of conduct was aimed at regulating search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean conducted by non-governmental actors, including those flying third states’ flags. However, as stressed by the Italian Association for Legal Studies on Immigration, this ‘code of conduct’ is just another example of a more general and regrettable trend towards regulating migration through atypical acts, in order to evade the judicial and democratic checks and balances that are inherent to a society based on the rule of law.Footnote ⁷⁴

The implications of this trend evoke the idea of the fruit of the poisonous tree: when policy decisions are undertaken through ambiguous legal instruments (and sometimes with instruments that are far beyond the spectrum of those that are suitable to be considered as proper sources of law), their effects are ill-fated, at least in terms of the coherence of the legal system. The prevalence of secondary regulations over the proper legislative acts stemming from Parliaments not only affects the conventional understanding of the rule of law, but also has significant consequences for the quality of regulation, the separation of powers, and the democratic oversight of legislation by Parliaments, which are by definition representative institutions that provide guarantees and where minorities can be represented and voice their political views.

Human rights theories, which encompass various mechanisms for safeguarding rights, emphasise the importance of constitutional and legal provisions mandating that certain matters be exclusively governed by Parliament.Footnote ⁷⁵ This legal safeguard is grounded in a dual assurance: the procedural aspect, reliant on the formal legislative process; and the democratic aspect, based on political control over parliamentary decision-making through the critical role of the opposition. Such dual assurance becomes particularly crucial when the rights in question pertain to a vulnerable group, such as migrants. As non-citizens, migrants lack representation based on citizenship, rendering them subject to the legal systems of their host countries without the possibility or capacity to influence the rules governing their lives. Ensuring that the plurality of political voices represented in Parliament can discuss and oversee legislation is the minimal guarantee contemporary democracies can offer to migrants. Where the primary role of Parliaments is bypassed, there is a serious risk of undermining the protection of rights. Secondary acts result in a lesser extent of effective parliamentary control, thus allowing broad discretion in shaping crucial migration policies. This trend concentrates decision-making and implementation in the hands of the executive. Consequently, the principle of the separation of powers takes on a distinct configuration in the realm of migration policy and law-making,Footnote ⁷⁶ with the executive historically assuming a dominant role vis-à-vis the legislature and judiciary.Footnote ⁷⁷

Once again, this phenomenon has implications that go well beyond the theoretical discussion of the new doctrines of the separation of powers in the 21st century, if applied in contexts where populist radical right parties dominate the scene. As regards the capacity of populist radical right parties and movements to determine the crucial trends of the political agenda, the new configuration of powers risks putting the executive branch under considerable pressure to respond to those parties and movements’ claims, thus further strengthening the stereotyping and alarming claims of those parties and movements.

The blurred distinction between immigration law and criminal law

A further element of the migration legal and policy domain to be taken into consideration is the phenomenon of ‘crimmigration’, that is, the growing tendency of the state to merge crime control and immigration control. The boundary between immigration law and criminal law, which for decades had evolved as separate legal fields, becomes blurred.Footnote ⁷⁸ The outcome is ‘the regulation of immigration through immigration-related criminal grounds such as unlawful re-entry, newer crimes such as fraudulent marriage for immigration purposes, or crimes that by their nature involve non-citizens, such as human smuggling or harbouring unlawfully present migrants’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Coupled with the escalating rhetoric about bogus asylum seekers and the narrative of illegal immigration, crimmigration has strongly contributed to embedding migration governance in both the theoretical and empirical frameworks of security and crime control, rather than in the context of guarantees of rights and the rule of law. ‘At its core, crimmigration law promotes a security-centred view of migrants and migration. A foundational tenet involves demonization of migrants and discussion of migrations as a threatening unknown’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In such a context, claims of migrants’ dangerousness dominate the scene and serve to justify a compression of rights, liberties and guarantees in the name of safety and security – claims that have traditionally found a vehicle in populist radical right parties and movements.

Migrants, therefore, are faced with an openly hostile legal setting, in which the very act of migrating is often criminalised. Furthermore, understanding rights and procedures may be very complex, and defending fundamental rights is difficult and turns out to be unsuccessful more often than it should,Footnote ⁸¹ regardless of whether migrants are seeking protection or looking for a better life. As already discussed, it is beyond the scope of this study to demonstrate that the dominant traits of the migration legal framework are the direct and sole product of populist radical right parties and movements’ claims, but the correspondence between those claims and the regulatory setting is undeniable.

When the condition of women is invoked to justify those claims, the phenomenon of constitutional degradation- that in this field is mainly characterised by the ‘deterioration of the rule of law’Footnote ⁸² -bridges the ambiguous discourse of gender equality under populism, producing major paradoxes.

Narrowing down legal entry channels

The first outcome of the misuse of women’s rights by populist radical right movements has been to provide a justification of the strong limitation of both forced and non-forced immigration on the alleged grounds of protecting national women against the brutality of foreigners, which is blamed on their culture of female submission (as has happened in Hungary, Poland, and Germany). The most typical populist slogan against immigration, ‘nationals first’, strongly reflects a protectionist attitude in favour of nationals’ wealth and well-being. It is coupled, here, with the even more prevalent, highly stereotyped, paternalistic discourse surrounding women’s need for protection. This is a narrative that perfectly fits with the idea of gender hierarchy, based on women’s natural inferiority,Footnote ⁸⁴ and provides an apparently noble legitimisation for the more selfish protectionist claims. The most paradigmatic examples of this are Orban’s and Kaczyński’s positions.

In Hungary, after a long reiteration of the state of crisis that since March 2016 has allowed pushbacks and the limitation of asylum-seeking at the borders in the transit zones,Footnote ⁸⁵ Government Decree 233/2020 and the subsequent Transitional Act of 16 June 2020 introduced new rules on asylum. Those wishing to seek asylum in Hungary have first to personally submit a ‘statement of intent for the purpose of lodging an asylum application’ at the Hungarian embassies in Belgrade or Kyiv (section 1, Decree 233/2020).Footnote ⁸⁶ Then, if the National Directorate-General for Aliens Policy in Budapest allows it to do so, the concerned embassy will issue a single-entry permit to access Hungary for the purpose of submitting the asylum application, which will, finally, be examined on the merits, and eventually asylum can be granted.Footnote ⁸⁷ Obviously, there have been no applications in the Kyiv Embassy since 2022. According to the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, in Belgrade eight Iranian nationals were granted the single-entry permit to submit the asylum application in 2021; four in 2022 and five in 2023 – the lowest rate of first-time applicants among EU member states, according to the International Organization for Migration.Footnote ⁸⁸ This stream of legislation exactly fits into the trend of securitisation and building barriers that is common well beyond HungaryFootnote ⁸⁹ and Poland.Footnote ⁹⁰

The exploitation of issues regarding women’s integrity and rights illustrated into the previous sections contributes to building and consolidating a legal framework that is hostile to the recognition of migrants’ rights. Moreover, ‘these narratives are both racist and sexist, since they divert sexism and sexualised violence into a cultural and personal problem of an othered group of men, while also using ascription and homogenisation to characterise this group as inferior and dangerous based on a constructed culture of values’.Footnote ⁹¹ That is to say, framing restrictive immigration rules in a gendered context also responds to the need to divert attention from the fact that the Polish and Hungarian legal systems are still imbued with gender-biased regulationsFootnote ⁹² and that both Hungary and Poland scored low in the 2022 Gender Equality Index.Footnote ⁹³ Not to mention that gender violence is a worldwide phenomenon, and data show that gender violence is very often associated with domestic violence,Footnote ⁹⁴ and not necessarily with immigration.Footnote ⁹⁵

The stereotyping and stigmatisation of women in Muslim societies

The second implication of the populist gender equality discourse as a European value directly mirrors the political discourse stereotyping and stigmatising women’s position in Muslim societies. ‘European women have not fought for centuries for their rights to find, at home, people that, in the name of Islam, deny gender equality’ affirmed Giorgia Meloni in 2018 on Facebook. Translated into legal measures, this common idea of populist radical right parties and movements is reflected in integration-related legislation that makes women the litmus paper to measure the degree of integration into host Western societies. This is best exemplified in the Netherlands. In the compulsory integration courses and texts used in such programmes, a number of gender-related practices are explicitly described as conflicting with Dutch and Western values. ‘The texts continuously emphasise gender rules and norms displaying an assumption that the reader embodies a pre-modern view of women and gender compared to the claimed Dutch modern standards’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Obviously, this is not to say that some gendered cultural and religious practices such as arranged marriages or sex-segregated education do not represent a violation of gender equality. The point is that ‘the implicit frame of the government has been that autochthonous women have accomplished gender equality, but that allochthonous women still do not fit into the Dutch gender model’.Footnote ⁹⁷ In Germany, in the integration test in Baden Württemberg, a question was worded something like ‘Your adult daughter/your wife would like to dress like other German girls and women. Would you attempt to prevent her from doing this?’. Questions such as that were later withdrawn,Footnote ⁹⁸ but the message conveyed through this approach is not simply that immigrants’ culture is per se suspicious and makes them unfit to enter the German society, but also that girls and women embody those traditional values presumed to be embraced by their backward culture, that they are subjugated, with no agency.

The thorny question of the veil can be framed in the same vein. It is not surprising that in Germany in 2018 the Alternative for Germany party proposed a bill in the Bundestag – the German House of Representatives – to ban full veiling in public spaces, streets included, marking a step in the direction of greater restrictions in comparison with the veil prohibitions in public services already existing in a number of Western countries.Footnote ⁹⁹

Much has been written on the topic and both the European Court of Human RightsFootnote ¹⁰⁰ and the European Court of JusticeFootnote ¹⁰¹ have delivered a number of decisions on the issue, deciding on a case-by-case basis. Noticeably, even in those cases where the ban on headscarves was found admissible, the European Court of Human Rights held that ‘a State Party cannot invoke gender equality in order to ban a practice that is defended by women – such as the applicant – in the context of the exercise of the rights enshrined in those provisions (Article 8 ECHR on private life and article 9 ECHR on religious freedom)’.Footnote ¹⁰²

Once again, without entering into the specific debate, these measures, in the name of gender equality, crystallising cultural backwardness into women, do not leave space for any recognition of women’s agency and may end up impacting on women’s dignity and the empowering process, resulting in their exclusion from public spaces.

The ‘nebula’ effect

The third outcome is more opaque; it consists in a plethora of secondary regulations that have a ‘nebula’ effect. Just as nebulae are conglomerates of interstellar dust, the migration legal framework is filled with a multiplicity of secondary, minor rules, addressing very diverse aspects of collective, ordinary life, while pushing the socio-political and cultural climate towards an intolerance saturation point. A blatant example of this is what is taking place in Italy, where administrative measures adopted by mayors have denied women wearing a so-called ‘burkini’ access to beaches or indirectly caused the cancellation of leisure events reserved for Muslim women.Footnote ¹⁰³ The same has happened in Hungary, where the niqab and burkini were locally banned by mayors.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Another interesting issue is access to sport and sport facilities.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A debate on the dress code of Muslim female athletes has been ongoing for a while. In France, for example, the Fédération Française de basketball, in Article 9.3 of the General Sports Regulations in Basketball, prohibits the wearing of ‘any equipment with a religious or political connotation’ at all levels and for all categories.

At the professional level, access to sport for athletes who wish to wear specific religious or cultural garments requires a delicate balance between necessary sports-specific equipment and clothing used during sports competitions, the athletes’ well-being and cultural and religious criteria.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ At the educational level there is a wide discussion on co-educational or single-sex sports classes at schools;Footnote ¹⁰⁷ and at the leisure level the debate focuses on the possibility of granting single-sex access to sport facilities. The debate spans throughout Europe, from Sweden, where in 2019 the chair of the Swedish Swimming Federation criticised an advert showing a Muslim girl participating in shooting competitions wearing a veil,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ to Italy, where in different regions the Lega has protested against the granting of reserved access to municipal sport facilities for migrant women to train.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

These kinds of elements are not usually considered when analysing the overall legal framework in migration-related analysis and political debate, as they are difficult to single out. More often than not they are minor rules and regulations, or they are issued by non-state authorities. Nonetheless, they may be very relevant for daily life. Moreover, if combined with the primary sources of law that define the immigration and integration regimes of different countries, political discourse and the socio-cultural processes of stigmatisation and marginalisation, they contribute to creating a generalised hostile regulatory environment that focuses on women to promote anti-immigration stances.