A French tribunal on Thursday suspended an outdoor mask mandate in Paris, even as the Covid-19 Omicron variant continues to rampage across France, reports Newsweek.
The suspension was first reported by French news agency AFP.
Amid rising cases of Covid, the French interior ministry's Paris Prefecture had enacted the mandate at the end of December. It required all persons operating in public in France to wear a mask, even when outside.
However, Paris' Administrative Tribunal struck down the mandate, allowing people in the French city to once again wear masks by choice. The decision comes just one day after a similar mandate was struck down in the Yvelines Department, near the city of Versailles.
In that decision, a local Versailles court stated that the mandate was "an excessive, disproportionate and inappropriate infringement ... of personal freedom."
As nations throughout the European Union approach the second-year anniversary of the fight against Covid, France has seen a back-and-forth relationship with both indoor and outdoor mask mandates.
The country's most-recent nationwide mask mandate was enacted last November, as case numbers and deaths spiked ahead of the emergence of the Omicron variant. This mandate, however, extended only to indoor settings and some outdoor locales with large crowds, differing from Paris' struck-down order that required masks everywhere.