Oslo
Bans Burqas at School
Schools in the Norwegian capital will ban Muslim girls from covering their faces, adding to the list of European cities and states that have banned the garment.
Toerger Odegaard, the head of the city's education department,
said Oslo's city council wants to ban the burqa and niqab, garments which cover
the face. He said teachers could not do their job properly without seeing
their students' faces. Religious symbols Fakhra Salimi, the head of MiRA a partly state-sponsored group
that helps female immigrants in Norway, said: "We have been having a discussion
about whether you should wear the niqab or not, but making laws which ban it is
just going too far."
"We will introduce a ban after
the summer holidays at the end of August," he told Reuters on
Wednesday.
Lawyers at the education ministry had just
told the council it would not be illegal under Norwegian law to ban the
headdress.
France has banned overt religious symbols at school. In December, the Dutch
parliament voted in favour of banning burqas, and the Belgian town of Maaseik
has forbidden them through an existing law which required people to be
identifiable in public.
Muslims in Norway - which has
large Pakistani and Somali minorities concentrated mainly in Oslo - said the
move was an encroachment on personal freedom.
She said women over the age of 16
should be able to wear the niqab if they chose.
| Reuters |