ZURICH: Muslim parents in Switzerland has no legal ground for keeping their daughters out of mandatory swim classes with boys at their co-ed school from now as Switzerland has won a case at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) obliging to send their children to mixed swimming lessons.

Aziz Osmanoglu and Sehabat Kocabas, both are Turkish and Swiss nationals, refused to send their two daughters to swimming lessons at their school in Basel for religious reasons.

The parents, who have been pressing this case for nearly a decade, argued that sending their children to swimming lessons with boys contravened Article 9 of the ECHR - the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. But the court on Tuesday rejected the argument, stating that "school played a special role in the process of social integration."

Earlier, in 2008, school officials in Basel, Switzerland, ordered a Muslim couple to enroll their daughters in a mandatory swimming class, despite the parents’ objections to having their girls learn alongside boys.

The officials offered the couple some accommodations: The girls, 9 and 7 at the time, could wear body-covering swimsuits, known as burkinis, during the swimming lessons, and they could undress for the class without any boys present.

But the parents refused to send their daughters to the lessons, and in 2010, the officials imposed a fine of 1,400 Swiss francs, about $1,380. The parents, Aziz Osmanoglu and Sehabat Kocabas, who have both Swiss and Turkish nationality, decided to sue.

On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the Swiss officials’ decision, rejecting the parents’ argument that the Swiss authorities had violated the “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, which the court enforces.

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