© Presseurop

Beyond the burqa

A French parliamentary commission recommends banning the burqa in certain public places. Though the issue is hotly contested in Denmark as well, the European press seems leery of actually outlawing the full Islamic veil.

Published on 27 January 2010 at 15:38
© Presseurop

On 26 January the French parliamentary committee submitted its long-awaited final report on the wearing of the burqa. The members recommend a "resolution", followed by a legal ban on wearing the burqa in state-run institutions (public offices, hospitals, schools, even school exits) and public transport. The law will require everyone “not only to show their face when entering state-run institutions or public transport, but also to keep their face bared” if they wish to obtain the services desired.

Not only that: two-thirds of the MPs in the ruling majority would like to extend the ban to the entire public realm. "The majority insisted on adding public humiliation to the constraints this measure would entail,” denounces Libération. “In other words, those paranoid about preserving French identity want to have these women – though they are more wronged than wrongdoing – stopped in the street and fined.”

Legally tricky

In the meantime, even after six months of deliberation, “We still don’t see clearly the outcome, if any, of these discussions,” complains La Libre Belgique: “a law, a regulation or not?” After all, “It’s one thing to issue regulations on access to public services. But it’s another to pass laws on what clothes are to be worn in public.” As a matter of fact, a wholesale burqa ban is liable to be quashed by the French Constitutional Council or the European Court of Human Rights anyway.

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Faced with like quandaries, the Danish government refrained from promulgating a burqa ban last September. The debate was reignited, however, by the publication of a survey revealing there are only 200 women in the country wearing the niqab (Arab-style face veil), and a mere three wearing the burqa (Afghan-style head-to-toe garment). “The only point of setting up a committee on the burqa was to smother an embarrassing debate” sparked by Naser Khader, explains the Jyllands-Posten. MP Khader, the conservative party’s spokesman on integration issues, has called for an all-out ban on the full body garment in the public sphere, even in private backyards visible from the street.

The burqa is not an invisibility cloak

"The burqa is not an invisibility cloak, writes Alice Thomson thus in The Times, "it's a passive-aggressive statement, a rejection of the community. The person wearing it is signalling that either she or her family wants her to remain apart from society. It implies that wearers believe that British men may become dangerously lecherous if they see their faces and that British women are too provocatively clad." However, "that doesn’t mean that Britain should ban the burka in public places. We don’t want the police stripping off women’s outer garments in the street. The French have gone too far by prohibiting the wearing of a full veil on public transport."

"Banning the burqa is simply not British,” maintains Dominic Lawson, also in The Times. "France, [...] since its bloody revolution, has had a determinedly anti-clerical political culture, regarding religion as something that has no place whatever in the public realm. That is not the British way; we evolved — not least as a result of our own historical experience — a much more tolerant approach to open expressions of religious difference, which can be summarised by the phrase ‘live and let live’.”

Political correctness gone mad

However, argues writer Monika Maron from Eastern Germany, our societies are so comfortably ensconced in the protection of their constitutionally guaranteed civil rights that they don’t perceive the inherent menace in Muslim fundamentalism. In the Spiegel she thrashes the journalists at major German dailies who, in her estimation, would prevent criticism of Islam from being aired, just as certain West German utopians censured criticism of East Germany back in 1988. "The debate is not about Islam and criticism thereof, but about our trust in democracy and in our right to insist on the laws […] that were won in secular battles against state and clerical despotisms. Are we to give all that up because those ‘who insist on tolerance cannot stop being tolerant when someone else doesn’t want to be tolerant’? By that line of reasoning, the sharia could become German law without a murmur of protest,” bridles Maron.

IN EUROPE

What sort of ban?

France is not the only country in Europe debating a ban on the full-body veil. "In Italy, a 1975 law prohibits covering the face with a handkerchief or helmet in public places,” explains La Stampa. It is this legislation, adds the Turin-based daily, that “has been invoked by several mayors from the Lega Nord [Northern League, a regionalist xenophobic party] to decree a local ban on the burqa”. Over in Belgium, where "there is no national law on wearing the veil”, several municipalities have likewise “taken the initiative to bar the full-body veil in public places, or they invoke municipal ordinances that prohibit wearing masks outside the carnival season”, specifies Le Soir. In the Netherlands and Denmark, "several bills are currently under consideration to ban the wearing of the full-body veil in public institutions and administrations (schools, offices, courts etc.)”. And in Austria, adds La Stampa, "the government, uneasy about the growing number of veiled women in the country, has begun debating the issue”. Back in Italy, the Lega Nord has tabled a bill to fine (up to €2,000) anyone who “on the grounds of his religious faith, makes it difficult or impossible to identify him”. In the UK, on the other hand, "the idea of legislating on the matter has been dropped, but heads of public and faith schools can prohibit the wearing of the whole-body veil on the premises".

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