France bans full face covering of women on Monday
PARIS: In Europe’s biggest Muslim population here the wearing of full-face veils in public banned on Monday, despite of many protest against the order it finally happened on Monday.
The first of its kind to be enforced in Europe ‘the draconian new law’ was immediately broken by a young woman from the southern city of Avignon, who has become the media symbol of France’s tiny community of niqab wearers.
Kenza Drider, 32, told reporters before boarding a train for Paris, “I had been invited to take part in a television programme which I am going for and I find that today is April 11, the first day of the application of the ban,”.
“This law infringes my European rights, I cannot but defend them, that is to say my freedom to come and go and my religious freedom,” the voluntary worker and mother-of-four said. “This law breaches these rights.”
Rights groups plan to protest against the ban on central Paris on Monday, and a businessman has announced that he will auction off a two-million-euro property to raise funds to pay any fines imposed on veil-wearers.
Meanwhile, French police fear the law will be impossible to enforce, since they have been given no power to use force to remove head coverings, and could face resistance in already tense immigrant districts.
“The law will be infinitely difficult to enforce, and will be infinitely rarely enforced,” said Manuel Roux, deputy head of a union representing local police chiefs, in an interview with France Inter radio.
“It’s not for the police to demonstrate zeal,” he said, predicting that when patrol officers meet veiled women they will simply try to explain the law to them and to persuade them to remove their face covering.
“If they refuse, that’s when things get really complicated. We have no power to force them,” he said. “I can’t begin to imagine we’re going to pay any attention to a veiled woman in a sensitive area, where men are proud.”
The law came into effect at an already fraught moment in relations between the state and France’s Muslim minority, with President Nicolas Sarkozy accused of stigmatising Islam to win back votes from a resurgent far right.
Only around 2,000 women, from a total Muslim population estimated at between four and six million, wear the full-face veils that are traditional in parts of Arabia and South Asia, a study said of French officials.
