Coming into effect on Saturday, July 23, a recently imposed Belgium ban on wearing full body Islamic veil, or burqa, is set to be challenged by two Belgian women before the country’s constitutional court for violating their human rights.
“My clients are far from being the only ones,” Ines Wouters told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) on Friday, July 22.
“This is really a head-on attack on the Muslim world.”
Belgium became the latest European country to ban the face-veil after a law banning the outfit came into effect on Saturday, July 23.
According to the new law, Muslim women would not be allowed to go in public while donning full face veil.
If any woman failed to comply with the law, she will be punished with a penalty of 137.50 euros ($195) and up to seven days behind bars as a punishment.
The move comes after France banned face-veil in public in April. Paris also banned the wearing of hijab in public in 2004.
Wouters, the lawyer, described the measure as disproportionate and discriminatory, arguing that it will further stigmatize the Muslim community.
She declared she would file her lawsuit with the constitutional court over the weekend, calling for reversing the burka ban as well as suspending it until the court rules on the matter.
Remaining unidentified, both women who took the case to the court are married, in their 30s and don’t consider wearing the burka “an obligation, but a choice they make,” Wouters said.
“They are being accused of cutting themselves off from society” by wearing the burka, the lawyer said.
“But, as one of them told me: ‘I am the one now being excluded from society.”‘
Belgian Muslims are estimated at 450,000 – out of a 10-million-population – about half of them are from Moroccan origin, while 120,000 are from Turkish origin.
Yet, a very small portion estimated to 200 to 300 of the country’s hundreds of thousands of Muslims wear the face veil in public.
While hijab is an obligatory code of dress for Muslim women, the majority of Muslim scholars agree that a woman is not obliged to wear the face veil.
Targeting Muslims
Referring to the tiny minority of Muslim women who don face-veil in Belgium, Muslim leaders denounced the ban as alienating Muslims by targeting them in a new law.
“You can go walk in our Muslim neighborhoods here and hardly see any women wearing a niqab,” Mustafa Kastit, an imam at the main mosque in Brussels, told Deutsche Welle on Saturday, July 23.
“It’s so rare here. So is it really worth legislating against them?”
Kastit worries that the law could alienate Muslims who already feel like they are being singled out on religious grounds.
“It risks stigmatizing the Muslim community even more, and it risks heightening this climate of fear, of Islamophobia that we see spreading across Europe and in all Western civilizations,” he said
Disappointing Muslim minority, the law has found unanimous support among all the political parties, a coup in this normally divided nation.
The only exception was the Green Party, the only parliamentarian who voted against the burqa ban.
Eva Brems, a member of the Green Party, views the law as the consequence of growing multicultural tension.
“It’s not a matter of increased Islamophobia, it’s about a tension in society with Islam and multiculturalism in general that tries to find a way to manifest itself and people feel that they should be allowed to be intolerant vis-à-vis a more radical Islam,” Brems told Deutsche Welle.
Brems believes that the ban is a clear violation of human rights and hopes it will be overturned.
“I am convinced it is a violation of human rights,” Brems said.
“I feel I am supported in this opinion by most of the human rights community. I hope it will be challenged and annulled.”
Last Wednesday, the European Union’s human rights watchdog criticized laws banning the wearing of Muslim veil, warning that the legislation fuels anti-Muslim sentiments across the continent.
Source: OnIslam & News Agencies
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