FRANCE has moved closer to enacting a law to restrict the wearing of the full veil after a cross-party report recommended banning it on public transport and in all state buildings.
After six months of hearings, a parliamentary commission concluded yesterday that women who covered their faces were challenging the values of the French Republic and called for legislation to ban the full veil in all town halls, hospitals, buses, trains and government offices.
However, it rejected the case made by many politicians for an outright ban in all public places.
Under the commission’s proposal, anyone who failed to show their face while using public transport or inside a state building would be refused access to services.
This would mean, for instance, that a fully veiled woman could not collect social welfare payments or take the bus.
“The wearing of the full veil is a challenge to our republic,” the report said. “This is unacceptable. We must condemn this excess.”
The commission called on parliament to adopt a resolution stating that the garment was “contrary to the values of the republic” and suggested that not wearing a burqa or niqab should be a condition for getting work permits and French citizenship.
The long-running debate on the burqa has divided political parties and caused tensions within President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party. Although many UMP politicians – including their leader in the National Assembly – were in favour of an outright ban, the commission believed that such a law could be struck out by the courts and would be difficult to enforce.
“There’s full support for not allowing people to be veiled in all cases of public service, be it a town hall, a post office or a bank,” Bernard Accoyer, president of the National Assembly, said as the report was published yesterday.
“We’d like to extend the ban to all public spaces, but we need to take the time to get the law right.”
Politicians from the opposition Socialist Party, resolutely opposed to the full veil but divided on how to act, boycotted the vote on the report in protest over how deliberations were “polluted” by the government’s ongoing public debate on national identity.
Mr Sarkozy has said the full veil is not welcome in France “because it is contrary to our values and contrary to the ideals we have of a woman’s dignity”.
However, he hinted last week at a preference for a partial ban when he said it was vital not to stigmatise any one group and to “find a solution which enables us to win the widest support”.
Shortly after the commission published its report yesterday, Mr Sarkozy paid a symbolically important visit to a cemetery in Notre-Dame-de-Lorette near Arras in northern France, where Muslim soldiers who fought under the French tricolour in the first World War are buried.
Headstones at the cemetery have been damaged and defaced with anti-Muslim slogans a number of times in recent years.
Meanwhile, a prominent French imam, Hassen Chalghoumi, said he received death threats earlier this week after he gave his support to calls for a ban on the full veil.
French intelligence services estimate that up to 2,000 women in France, of whom nearly all are young, cover their faces. Two-thirds are French citizens and a quarter are converts to Islam.