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Girls are legally permitted to swim topless in Berlin, the town’s authorities stated final week.
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This comes after a girl was barred from getting into a public pool topless in December.
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She filed a discrimination grievance. It led to the town declaring that everybody can swim topless.
Girls are legally permitted to swim topless in swimming swimming pools in Berlin, the town’s authorities stated final week.
The announcement got here after Lotte Mies, 33, filed a discrimination grievance in December in opposition to a pool within the German capital. She stated the pool barred her from entry as a result of she was topless, per the German information retailers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Tagesspiegel.
Whereas swimming topless was not expressly forbidden in Berlin, the grievance by Mies prompted the town’s Senate Division for Justice, Range, and Anti-Discrimination to place in place a rule that enables everybody to swim topless.
A press launch issued by the division on Thursday stated the pool that barred Mies from getting into didn’t have any “gender-specific stipulations” and solely requested its patrons to put on “industrial swimwear.”
The present guidelines for swimwear in Berlin are that swimmers should put on “commonplace swimwear,” reminiscent of “swimming trunks, swimming shorts, bikini, swimsuit, burkini,” per the Berliner Bäder, the town’s swimming affiliation. However these pointers had a loophole and didn’t specify that girls should cowl their chests. It additionally didn’t expressly forestall ladies from simply sporting swimming shorts to the pool, like males.
The town’s transfer to permit topless swimming no matter gender is supposed to create “equal rights for all Berliners, whether or not male, feminine or non-binary”, stated Doris Liebscher, head of the town’s ombudsman’s workplace for equal remedy in opposition to discrimination, within the press launch.
This ruling would offer “authorized certainty for the employees” working at swimming pools, she added.
The clarification by the town’s authorities is a nod to Germany’s “Freikörperkultur” or “free physique tradition,” which promotes the well being advantages of nudity whereas exercising or being in nature, per CNN.
Berlin is just not the primary metropolis in Germany to permit folks to swim whereas topless. Goettingen, a metropolis in central Germany, allowed swimmers of all genders to enter public swimming pools topless on weekends final Might, per Euronews.
Over 130 nudist golf equipment additionally exist within the nation, per the Deutscher Verband für Freikörperkultur, a German affiliation selling “Free Physique Tradition.”
Representatives of Berlin’s Senate Division for Justice, Range and Anti-Discrimination, and the Berliner Bäder didn’t instantly reply to Insider’s request for remark.
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