WUNRN
FRANCE - FULL-FACE VEILS LAW TO
ENTER EFFECT - CONTROVERSIAL
Veils that cover the face to be illegal from next month.
From Saudi tourists
window-shopping on the Champs-Élysées to Muslim women in a departure lounge at
Charles de Gaulle airport or the few young French converts on suburban estates,
any woman who steps outside in
Face veils will be outlawed
virtually anywhere outside women's own homes, except when they are worshipping
in a religious place or travelling as a passenger in a private car, although
traffic police may stop them if they think they do not have a clear "field
of vision" while driving. Women wearing niqab will be fined €150 (about
£130) and be given a citizenship class to remind them of the republican values
of secular
The niqab
ban, proposed by a communist MP but later championed by Nicolas Sarkozy and his
rightwing ruling UMP party, has reopened the long-running debate over how the
country with Europe's biggest Muslim
community integrates Islam into its secular republic.
The timing of the new law risks
plunging
Sarkozy's move comes as Marine Le
Pen, the new leader of the Front National, has seen her party's popularity soar
to unprecedented levels since she compared Muslims praying in the streets
outside overcrowded mosques to the Nazi occupation of
One indication of the mood of
unease in France is local authorities taking steps to ban proposed "pork
and wine aperitifs" by rightwingers deliberately staged near Muslim places
of worship, including a "rosé wine and porchetta" evening to be held
near a Muslim place of prayer in Nice on Friday night.
The prime minister, François
Fillon, this week distanced himself from Sarkozy's debate on Islam and said he
was opposed to the "stigmatisation of Muslims". To get around
accusations that the niqab ban unfairly prejudices French Muslims, his office
has been tying itself in semantic knots over the law.
It is now officially called the
bill against "covering one's face in public places", which Fillon
deems an issue of public order and gender equality, not secularism. This means
wearing any face covering, including balaclavas, hoodies or masks, is against
the new law. So the state has had to seek special exemptions for motorcycle
helmets or sports equipment such as fencing masks. There are also exemptions
for people appearing in parades, celebrations or places of worship. After a
teacher was convicted for trying to rip a face veil from an Emirati tourist in
a shop, the law states public officials cannot force women to remove their
niqabs in the street but must instead call the police or gendarmes.
Fillon argued that face coverings
put those who wear them "in a situation of exclusion and inferiority
incompatible with the principles of liberty, equality and human dignity
affirmed by the French republic."
But the immigration historian
Patrick Weil has warned that the law is open to challenge from the European
court of human rights. He said the battle to stop women wearing niqab did not
justify that "a woman who believes that her God orders her to wear it
should be stopped from going out to buy food to feed herself, or from going to
see a doctor".
A tiny minority of women in
In 2004, after another heated
national debate,
A worker in
a private creche went to court and lost after she claimed she was fired for
refusing to take off her headscarf. The education minister insisted that
mothers in headscarves should not be allowed to accompany children on school
outings. One mother banned from escorting her son's primary school class for
wearing a simple head-covering said: "I'm French, not a fanatic, I just
want to be able to practise my religion without being
ostracised."