House of Lords rules Sikhs an ethnic group in Mandla v Dowell Lee

Who: Sewa Singh Mandla, a Birmingham solicitor, and his son Gurinder; the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), which took up the case; Mr Dowell Lee, headmaster of Park Grove School; and the judges, among them Lord Denning and five Law Lords.

What: In July 1978 Mandla asked Park Grove School, a private school in Edgbaston, Birmingham, to admit Gurinder, then 13, who wore a turban and kept his hair uncut. The headmaster would not relax the school's uniform and haircut rules, and wrote on 24 July 1978 that he saw no way to reconcile them. The CRE helped Mandla sue under the Race Relations Act 1976, which bans racial discrimination in schools. The question was whether Sikhs count as a racial group defined by "ethnic origins".

• Birmingham County Court: the judge held that Sikhs were not a racial group, so there was no discrimination (10 December 1980, according to Gurmit Singh).
• Court of Appeal, 29 July 1982: Lord Denning, with Lords Justices Oliver and Kerr, dismissed the appeal. He wrote that Sikhs could be told apart only by religion and culture, which was "not an ethnic difference at all", and that it is lawful to discriminate against groups such as Moonies or Skinheads when it is not on racial grounds. Sikhs found the comparison insulting. Politicians and the press said the ruling went against Parliament's intention, and on 10 October a march to 10 Downing Street handed in a petition of more than 75,000 signatures. Denning later wrote that the court had not been told of the White Paper or the Commons debates.
• House of Lords, 24 March 1983: Lords Fraser, Edmund-Davies, Roskill, Brandon and Templeman allowed the appeal.

Lord Fraser's test was that a group must see itself, and be seen by others, as a distinct community. Two things are essential: a long shared history it keeps alive and a cultural tradition of its own. Sikhs met it, he held, although they cannot be told apart biologically from other Punjabis. A rule that Sikhs "can" only meet by giving up their customs, such as the school's ban on turbans, does not count as one they can comply with, and the headmaster could not justify it, because his main reason was that the turban showed the boy's ethnic origins. Lord Templeman said Sikhs are more than a religious sect, "almost a race and almost a nation".

Where: Park Grove School in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and the courts in Birmingham and London.

Why it mattered: The ruling put Sikhs in Britain under the protection of the Race Relations Act and ended the argument that a turban rule is lawful because Sikhism is only a religion.