Frenchwoman Gabrielle Lebreton won the lawsuit and won the right to stay topless in the pools of Berlin.
In 2022, Lebreton, who has lived in the German capital for over 10 years, filed a lawsuit against local authorities, alleging that she was discriminated against. A woman was relaxing with her five-year-old son and girlfriend on one of the hot summer days in the Plansche pool in the Treptow-Köpenick region. At some point, she took off the top of her bathing suit. Seeing her bare chest, law enforcement officers approached and demanded to put on a bathing suit. Leberton refused, saying that the men around were not considered naked, despite the fact that they were only wearing swimming trunks. The guards called the police, who gave the woman a condition — either she puts on a swimsuit top or must leave the territory.
The woman took this as discrimination and applied to the city court, guided by the anti-discrimination law adopted in 2020. She said she was teaching her son that breasts in men and women are just secondary sex characteristics and everyone should have the same right to expose them when it's hot.
This week Berlin's Berliner Baederbetriebe, which manages the city's swimming pools, agreed with Lebreton's arguments and ordered all public swimming pools to allow women to sunbathe and swim topless.
all residents of Berlin, whether male, female or non-binary, and also creates legal certainty for Baederbetriebe employees,» said Doris Liebscher, head of the ombudsman's office.
Berlin has become the latest German city to introduce softer dress — code in the pools. In 2022, topless swimming in public pools was allowed by Siegen in North Rhine-Westphalia and Göttingen in Lower Saxony.
Also last year, Hannover changed its rules to require that only «primary genitals» be covered in pools .
And in some private pools, such as Vabali, a chain of spas in Berlin and Hamburg, visitors are required to wear no bathing suits, and only towels are allowed in the bathing areas.< /p>