Europe grapples with whether to ban Muslim burqas and niqabs

After France banned veils in 2011, a French woman in her early 20s decided to fight for her niqab.

Backed by a group of Birmingham lawyers, the Pakistan-born university graduate and devout Sunni took her case to the European court of human rights, asking them to support her faith, culture and personal convictions.

But her suit was rejected in a decision handed down three months ago. And the decision has given new fuel to an already growing push across Europe to remove Muslim veils from society.

The woman, known to the court as “SAS”, said neither her husband nor any member of her family pressured her to dress in the burqa and niqab – her aim was “to feel at inner peace with herself”. She was happy to take it off for security checks at banks or airports, or other necessary identity checks, but wanted the right to wear it around town.

“Her faith is an essential element of her existence, she is a devout believer and the wearing of the veil is fundamental for her,” SAS’s lawyers argued. “The wearing of the veil often denoted women’s emancipation, self-assertion and participation in society, and that, as far as [SAS] was concerned, it was not a question of pleasing men but of satisfying herself and her conscience.”

SAS was backed by Amnesty International – who warned that restricting a right to wear religious clothing could impair women’s right to work and education, and might “contribute to acts of harassment and violence”.

And the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University warned that “in the light of the rise in Islamophobia in various European countries … a blanket ban on face covering in public [was] all the more harmful”.

However the French government argued the aim of the ban was “public safety”. An open and democratic society required a visible face – “the face plays a significant role in human interaction … the effect of concealing one’s face in public places is to break the social tie and to manifest a refusal of the principle of ‘living together’ (le vivre ensemble’),” Paris lawyers said.

In the end, the court upheld the ban. It did not see any “general threat to public safety” but agreed that public order was a legitimate aim of the law - saying a veil made it harder for a diverse society to live together.

The decision has brought burqa bans back onto the table in countries across the European Union, such as Austria, Norway and Denmark.

Martin Henriksen, from Denmark’s anti-immigration People’s Party, said: "[A ban] would send the signal that we do not accept parallel societies and isolation. We see [the burqa] as a rejection of Danish society.”

Norway’s Labour and Progress parties have also pushed to reopen the debate, after it was voted down by the governing coalition and the opposition in 2010.

In Switzerland, former journalist Giorgio Ghiringhelli has renewed his call for the country’s Grand Council to ban veils. Last year he led a campaign that ended with the Swiss canton of Ticino voting to ban face-covering headgear in public places – despite the fact that only about 100 women in the entire country wore burqas.

Ghiringhelli told swissinfo.ch that it was important to send a clear signal that the people were against “militant Islamism”.

Belgium enacted a similar law at the same time as France (some Belgian districts had already imposed local bans using old laws aimed at carnival disguises).

And some Italian towns and Spanish towns have enforced local burqa bans.

However the trend has not all been one-way. In 2010 Spain’s Lerida municipality banned full-face veils but in 2013 the country’s Supreme Court annulled the laws, finding they had no “legitimate aims”, would isolate the women concerned and give rise to discrimination against them.

And in 2011 the Netherlands government’s highest advisory body – the Council of State – rejected a proposed veil-banning law, saying the government had not demonstrated a “pressing social need”. The ban plan was dropped in 2012 after the collapse of the Dutch centre-right government.

There are even fears that burqa bans in Europe could indirectly lead to an increase in terrorism.

Dr Irene Zempi, a researcher into Islamophobia at the University of Leicester, sees increasing support for burqa bans in Europe – and it worries her.

“Muslims see that they are targeted, their right and freedom to practise their religion is taken away,” she said. “They feel further and further isolated from the wider community and I think this is very dangerous. The more separated they become, it plays into the hands of terrorist groups… like ISIS who say ‘come to us, we will support you, we will give you your identity, here you will find a sense of belonging’.”

Dr Zempi agreed that veils should occasionally be lifted. “When there is a need for veiled women to identify themselves to an official person, this should take place. But banning the veil would be a violation of human rights and also an example of gender oppression,” she said.

“There is this stereotype that Muslim women are forced to wear the veil by Muslim men or by their communities,” she said.

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