Supreme Court to hear Wesley Girls' religious rights case on April 21
By DL News
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Updated
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The case was brought by Shafic Osman, who wants the court to rule that policies said to affect Muslim students at the school violate the 1992 Constitution.
A constitutional dispute over religious practice at Wesley Girls’ High School is set to return to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, 21 April 2026, when the court will hear arguments on whether some of the school’s directives are lawful.
The case was brought by Shafic Osman, who wants the court to rule that policies said to affect Muslim students at the school violate the 1992 Constitution. He argues that the directives compel Muslim students to take part in Christian worship and prevent them from fully observing their own faith.
At an earlier sitting, the court gave the school’s Board of Directors 14 days to answer the claims.
The school, however, has raised a procedural objection. Its position is that the Board itself is not the proper legal entity to be served, arguing instead that the correct party should be the Trustees of the Methodist Church, who hold the land and property of the institution.
The case has also drawn wider religious and legal interest.
The Catholic Church has filed written arguments in the matter, urging the Supreme Court to decline jurisdiction. It says the appropriate court for enforcing the rights of the affected Muslim students is the High Court, not the apex court.
The Church also advances a broader argument about the status of faith-based schools. It maintains that such institutions are not state-owned, but are created and sustained through church resources. On that basis, it argues that students who voluntarily enrol in such schools may be taken to have accepted certain limitations associated with the school’s religious identity.
The Attorney-General’s office has taken a similar line.
Deputy Attorney-General Dr Justice Srem-Sai has argued that Wesley Girls’ High School belongs to the Methodist Church rather than the state and is therefore entitled to manifest its religious character in accordance with Methodist doctrine.
He further contends that receiving government financial support does not strip the school of that religious identity. In his view, public funding alone cannot be used to deny the school the freedom to operate in line with its faith tradition.
The dispute is shaping up as a major constitutional test of where the line should be drawn between individual religious freedom and the institutional autonomy of mission-founded schools.
