Belgium’s lower house of parliament on Thursday banned burqa-type Islamic dress in public, but the measure faces a challenge in the Senate that will delay early enactment of the law.
Christian Democrats and Liberals in the Senate questioned the phrasing of the law, which holds that no one can appear in public “with the face fully or partly covered so as to render them no longer recognizable.”
Following the fall of former Beligian prime minister Yves Leterme’s government on April 22, Belgium faces early elections that may delay passage of the Belgian anti-burqa ban — Europe’s first — by several months. Both houses of parliament must approve the bill.
Approval in the lower house was almost unanimous.
Like elsewhere in Europe, Belgium struggles with anxieties that visible signs of Islam erode national identity and that women in traditional conservative Islamic dress, such as the burqa, the chador and the niqab, signal a refusal to assimilate in Western society.
The law’s author, Daniel Bacquelaine, a Liberal, said a burqa is incompatible with basic security as everyone in public must be recognizable and clashes with the principles of an emancipated society that respects the rights of all.
Burqa-type Islamic dress that fully covers a woman and most or all of her face is not common in Europe.
Last year, the city of Brussels fined only 29 women — down from 33 in 2008 — for wearing a burqa-type dress. In Belgium, local rules ban the burqa, but enforcement is spotty and the new law would outlaw it on a national level.
In January, Denmark’s center-right government called the burqa and the niqab out of step with Danish values.
It held off on a ban after finding that only two or three women in Denmark, a nation of 5.5 million people, wear burqas and perhaps 200 wear niqabs.
In France, a nation of 65 million people, the government estimates 1,900 women cover their faces with niqabs, a scarf that exposes only the eyes, or sitars, a filmy veiled cloth thrown over the head to cover the entire face.
France banned Muslim head scarves as well as Jewish skullcaps and Christian crosses from schools in 2004.
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