French PM Announces Anti-Niqab Law for July

French PM Fillon announced to Parliament his government would push for new law prohibiting full head-coverings.
French PM Announces Anti-Niqab Law for July
4/27/2010
Updated:
10/1/2015

<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/french98636242.jpg" alt="Anne (R), a French Muslim woman fined for driving while wearing a full-face veil, answers journalists' questions on April 23 in Nantes, western France. Police stopped the woman and fined her 22 euros (US$29) on the grounds that her niqab�an Islamic veil with a slit for the eyes�restricted her view so she could not drive safely. (Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images)" title="Anne (R), a French Muslim woman fined for driving while wearing a full-face veil, answers journalists' questions on April 23 in Nantes, western France. Police stopped the woman and fined her 22 euros (US$29) on the grounds that her niqab�an Islamic veil with a slit for the eyes�restricted her view so she could not drive safely. (Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1820558"/></a>
Anne (R), a French Muslim woman fined for driving while wearing a full-face veil, answers journalists' questions on April 23 in Nantes, western France. Police stopped the woman and fined her 22 euros (US$29) on the grounds that her niqab�an Islamic veil with a slit for the eyes�restricted her view so she could not drive safely. (Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images)
PARIS—French Prime Minister François Fillon announced to Parliament on April 27 that by next July his government would push for a new law prohibiting full head-coverings. The Muslim face-veils, called the niqab or burqa, are described by women’s right defenders as “walking prisons.”

Fillon did not say whether the law would follow an “emergency procedure” that would allow it to be passed by a single vote in Parliament before being reviewed by the Senate. Such a decision would be unwelcome, claim Parliament and Senate Presidents Bernard Accoyer and Gerard Larcher, who wish both chambers examine the law twice so as to ensure due process.

President of the French Socialist Party Jean-Marc Ayrault, currently in opposition, initially criticized the law but finally said he would not oppose the vote, under two conditions: that the “emergency procedure” would not be used, and that the advice of the Council of State, a high-level legal advisory body to the government, would be taken into consideration.

The Council stated on March 30 that such a law could very likely betray the spirit of the French Constitution, and finds only weak legal support.

Playing Out in the Media

Parallel to the face-veil debate, the French media was recently engulfed in a robust debate around a fine given a Muslim woman who was driving her car wearing a niqab in the western city of Nantes.

Local news outlets initially triggered a small scale controversy on the “security threat” of the niqab, the ostensible basis of the fine, according to police. But the incident went national when Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux accused the woman’s husband of polygamy and welfare fraud, claims which if proven, he said, would mean the man loses his French citizenship. Based on available information, the man—a butcher—has 12 children to four wives, three of whom receive a state pension on grounds of being “isolated women.”

On April 26, the man denied he was polygamous to French press. “I do have mistresses, this is not forbidden by Islam; maybe it is by Christianity, but not in France as far as I know. ... If one has to be deprived of nationality because of having mistresses, then many French people should also be deprived.”

Controversial far-right figure Jean-Marie Le Pen strongly supported the efforts of Brice Hortefeux, whom he called “a man of goodwill” during an interview with RTL radio. Yet, said Le Pen, “the most important thing” is not about the four wives “wearing total face-coverings” but the fact that “they benefit from state pensions”: “[Public money] is ransacked by tens or hundreds of thousands of people who exploit the gaps of our legislation. When this is the result of a family plot, I think this is a scandal.”

Several newspapers feared that the media exploitation of the incident by the government could have a boomerang effect. La Croix newspaper, for instance, pointed out that the French legal system would not permit deprivation of the man’s French nationality unless major crimes were involved. L'Union newspaper anticipated a Mr. Hortefeux feeling “bitter regret [for] not having better read the French civil code.”

The Journal de la Haute-Marne pointed out that radical Muslims could now pose as victims and gain sympathy in the moderate Muslim community.

Laws prohibiting wearing of burqa (full body, including head) and/or niqab (only head) coverings in public places is close to being passed in Belgium. In Denmark, wearing the garments has been “limited” but not forbidden in public places since January this year. In Netherlands, a law echoing the French and Belgian texts is currently being drafted, while in Italy full face coverings have been forbidden since 1975—at that time Italy faced left-wing terrorism and passed the law on security grounds.

In all countries, governments face the challenge of preserving women’s dignity and public security while not ostracizing Muslims or exciting xenophobic sentiments. The answer to this challenge has so far been to argue that the law was applicable to any face-covering, and not specifically the Muslim sort—an argument that has not yet proven convincing.