French burqa ban has nothing to do with women’s rights

international | gender and sexuality | other press

Thursday July 22, 2010 13:26

by Clara Zetkin

The ban on the wearing of the burqa is wrong. Just as it it is wrong to force women to wear the veil. The French Left have been found wanting. Full story at link.

The fact that only one French MP - a member of the rightwing UMP - voted against the ban on the burqa says it all.
On July 13, the bill prohibiting the “covering of the face in public” received the votes of 335 deputies. The bill does not specify Muslims or women, but everyone knows who the targets are - the less than 2,000 women in France who normally dress in the full-length burqa or niqab. After the law comes into force next year - it has yet to pass through the senate and may face a challenge in the constitutional court - those who continue to cover up will face a €150 fine and/or compulsory citizenship classes. Those who “force” a person to wear such attire could be looking at a €30,000 fine and a one-year jail sentence (the penalties will be even stiffer if a minor is made to cover their face).

So what happened to the left opposition in parliament? The Parti Communiste Français, Parti Socialiste and the Greens abstained - or rather they staged a boycott of the vote. Not because they could not bring themselves to be present when such an appalling attack on an oppressed minority was being adopted, but because they did not want to appear “pro-burqa” by voting against the bill. PCF parliamentary spokesperson Roland Muzeau said that the law had “nothing to do with defending women’s rights” and would “stigmatise Muslims”. But he led his troops out of the chamber all the same.

It is likely the PCF would have voted for the bill if it had been limited to people working in public services or shops - most, after all, voted for the 2004 ban on the wearing of the hijab by Muslim girls in state schools. As it was, one ‘communist’ deputy, the anti-migrant, anti-European Union nationalist, André Gerin, voted with the government. Gerin claims that to wear the burqa is to “renounce the republic”.