French report calls for limits on veils

PARIS (AP) — Mass transport, hospitals, post offices — these and all public services in France would be off-limits to Muslim women wearing face-covering veils if a parliamentary panel’s recommendations, released Tuesday, become law.

The panel’s No. 2 predicts such a ban by year’s end.

As envisaged by the 32-member multiparty panel, a woman seeking unemployment benefits or other state aid, for instance, would walk away empty-handed if she refused to uncover her face. She also would be denied entrance to the local town hall, the bus, the Metro and the university classroom.

A panoply of recommendations aimed at dissuading Muslim women from hiding their faces is contained in the report, which was drawn up after six months of hearings from experts, Muslim leaders and others. One of the other recommendations: denying resident cards and citizenship to women who wear all-encompassing veils.

However, the panel was bitterly divided over recommending a ban on face-covering veils on the street, and that was not among the 15 recommendations retained after a vote.

President Nicolas Sarkozy put the issue before the French in June when he told a joint gathering of parliament that face-covering veils “are not welcome” in France.

Only several thousand women in France are thought to wear burqa-style garments, usually pinning a “niqab” across their faces to go with their long, dark robes. Such veils are widely seen as a gateway to extremism and an attack on gender equality and secularism, a basic value of modern-day France.

“The all-enveloping veil represents, in an extraordinary way, everything that France instinctively rejects. This is the symbol of the enslavement of women and the banner ... of extremist fundamentalism,” said Bernard Accoyer, president of the National Assembly, the lower house, after being presented with the report.

Despite the acrimony, the recommendation to ban the veils in public-sector facilities could be in place “before the end of the year,” conservative lawmaker Eric Raoult, the panel’s No. 2, told The Associated Press.

“We need maybe six months or a little more to explain what we want,” he told The AP, adding that “by the end of 2010” there could be such an interdiction.

Accoyer was more vague but told a news conference that “we can certainly find solutions in a brief time.”

Numerous experts have noted that a 2004 law banning the Muslim headscarf and other “ostentatious” religious signs in primary and secondary schools has pushed some young girls out of school and contributed to the founding of private Muslim schools.

Muslim leaders have said the face-covering veil is not required by Islam and is an “extreme practice.” However, the main body representing Muslims also has voiced displeasure with the panel’s work, saying it contributed to stigmatizing Muslims, along with an ongoing debate on France’s national identity that has focused on immigrants.

France has the largest Muslim population in western Europe — estimated at 5 million — and discrimination has become a grave source of concern.

On Tuesday, just hours after the report was presented, Sarkozy visited a Muslim cemetery in northern France that has been desecrated twice. Secularism, he said in a speech honoring Muslims who fought and died for France, “is not the negation of religion.” But it is “an essential component of our identity.”

Bitterness spilled beyond the lawmakers’ forum as a group of hard-line Muslims forced their way into a mosque in Drancy, northeast of Paris, threatening the imam, or prayer leader, who came out last week for a full ban on the veils.