By Nawab Khan

BRUSSELS, April 7 (Saba) -- An European human rights organisation has criticised a recent vote by a committee in Belgiums parliament to ban the burqa, a veil covering the face, in public and said the draft law could be dismissed by international courts as it lacks legal base.

Michael Privot, Director of the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) told KUNA that he regrets the decision of the home affairs committee in the Belgian parliament was taken without consultation at political level and neither through a debate with the persons wearing the niqab (veil).

An estimated three dozen Muslim women wear the burqa in Belgium out of a Muslim population of about 500,000. "Muslim communities will have the feeling that it is a law of exception taken against them. It will further alienate them and make it more difficult to buy Muslim communities into becoming reliable partners for change - both with the minority and the majority communities," Privot noted.

Brussels-based ENAR is an EU-wide network of more than 600 organisations working to combat racism in all the 27 EU member states.

Privot said that such unprecedented move is also the result of "an extremely negative narrative about Mslims and Islam in Europe." He explained that it will send the signal that those persons wearing the niqab are not part of the social fabric of our society though most of them are second generation Belgians or converts to Islam.

If the parliamentarians , he said, were serious "about their plea to free those Muslim women from the oppression they would be living in, they would have devised appropriate measures to counterbalance the negative impact such ban would have on their opportunities to go out of their households to seek support and freedom. "

Moreover, the Muslim women wearing freely a burqa will feel that their freedom to practice their religion in public is being trampled over just because they are Muslim. This new law will be perceived as unjust and failing to reach its objectives by criminalising the wearing of particular garments, stated the director of ENAR
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The Belgian parliament is expected to vote on the draft law at the end of April and if the bill is approved Belgium could become the first European country to implement a burqa ban in public. Analysts opine that the wording of the draft law says the burqa ban would apply to areas accessible to the public, which would include women walking in the street or using public transport, and would be enforced by fines or even prison for a week.

Privot said this proposal law constitutes also a rupture with the "pragmatic Belgian way" of bringing consensual and balanced solutions for complex societal problems and risks to be dismissed by international courts in the future as it lacks a strong legal base.

"In the end, this would further discredit political representatives due to their careless way of approaching the management of diversity in an increasingly diverse and diversifying country as Belgium," he added.


Saba