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| Claude Paris/The Associated Press |
| France's Kenza Drider wears a niqab , as she reads a magazine in a shop, in Avignon, southern France, A ban on the burqa-style veil, to be voted on Tuesday in the Senate, would affect only a tiny minority of Muslim women. |
Paris, Sep. 15, 2010: Leaders of both parliamentary houses say they asked special council to ensure constitutionality, amid concerns of limiting religious freedom.
The French Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a bill banning the burka-style Islamic veil in public, but the leaders of both parliamentary houses said they had asked a special council to first ensure the measure passes constitutional muster amid concerns its tramples on religious freedoms.
The Senate voted 246 to 1 Tuesday in favour of the bill, which has already passed in the lower chamber, the National Assembly. It will need President Nicolas Sarkozy's signature.
Legislative leaders said they wanted the constitutional council to examine it.
“This law was the object of long and complex debates,” the Senate president, Gerard Larcher, and National Assembly head Bernard Accoyer said in a joint statement explaining their move. They said in a joint statement that they want to be sure there is “no uncertainty” about it conforming to the constitution.
The measure affects less than 2,000 women.
Many Muslims believe the legislation is one more blow to France's second religion, and risks raising the level of Islamophobia in a country where mosques, like synagogues, are sporadic targets of hate. However, the vast majority behind the measure say it will preserve the nation's singular values, including its secular foundation and a notion of fraternity that is contrary to those who hide their faces.
France would be the first European country to pass such a law though others, notably neighbouring Belgium, are considering laws against face-covering veils, seen as anathema to the local culture.
“Our duty concerning such fundamental principles of our society is to speak with one voice,” said Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, opening a less than 5-hour-long debate ahead of the vote.
The law was passed overwhelmingly by the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, on July 13.
The measure would outlaw face-covering veils in streets, including those worn by tourists from the Middle East and elsewhere. It is aimed at ensuring gender equality, women's dignity and security, as well as upholding France's secular values — and its way of life.
Kenza Drider, however, says she'll flirt with arrest to wear her veil as she pleases.
“It is a law that is unlawful,” said Ms. Drider, a mother of four from Avignon, in southern France. “It is ... against individual liberty, freedom of religion, liberty of conscience," she said.
“I will continue to live my life as I always have with my full veil,” she told Associated Press Television News.
Ms. Drider was the only woman who wears a full-faced veil to be interviewed by a parliamentary panel that spent six months deciding whether to move ahead with legislation.
Muslim leaders concur that Islam does not require a woman to hide her face. However, they have voiced concerns that a law forbidding them to do so would stigmatize the French Muslim population, which at an estimated 5 million is the largest in western Europe. Numerous Muslim women who wear the face-covering veil have said they are now being harassed in the streets.
Raphael Liogier, a sociology professor who heads the Observatory of the Religious in Aix-en-Provence, says that Muslims in France are already targeted by hate-mongers and the ban on face-covering veils “will officialize Islamophobia.”
“With the identity crisis that France has today, the scapegoat is the Muslim,” he told The Associated Press.
Ironically, instead of helping some women integrate, the measure may keep them cloistered in their homes to avoid exposing their faces in public.
“I won't go out. I'll send people to shop for me. I'll stay home, very simply,” said Oum Al Khyr, who wears a “niqab” that hides all but the eyes.
“I'll spend my time praying,” said the single woman “over 45” who lives in Montreuil on Paris' eastern edge. “I'll exclude myself from society when I wanted to live in it.”
The law banning the veil would take effect only after a six-month period.
The Interior Ministry estimates the number of women who fully cover themselves at some 1,900, with a quarter of them converts to Islam and two-thirds with French nationality.
The French parliament wasted no time in working to get a ban in place, opening an inquiry shortly after Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy said in June 2009 that full veils that hide the face are “not welcome” in France.
The bill calls for 150 euro fines or citizenship classes for any woman caught covering her face, or both. It also carries stiff penalties for anyone such as husbands or brothers convicted of forcing the veil on a woman. The 30,000 euro fine and year in prison are doubled if the victim is a minor.
It was unclear, however, how authorities planned to enforce such a law.
“I will accept the fine with great pleasure,” said Ms. Drider, vowing to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if she gets caught.