People marked International Women’s Day yesterday in a variety of ways. In Europe, the Commissioner for Human Rights for the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammarberg, made news with the publication of his Viewpoint that bans against the Islamic niqab or burqa would violate a woman’s privacy and could potential violate the European Convention on Human Rights. Such bans have been proposed in France and discussed in other European countries, nominally for the purposes of liberating Muslim women. But as Hammarberg pointed out, such bans could further marginalize Muslim women in European societies rather than free them.
One of the main reasons raised in the Viewpoint was similar to what I pointed out a month ago: women are not “freed” from the possible oppressive nature of veils in extremely repressive Muslim countries by banning the voluntary wearing of the veil in Europe. Instead, the ban results in the exact same outcome for women empowerment, only instead or forcing women to wear the veil, it prohibits women from ever wearing the veil. In the end, the state is still dressing women, which is not my idea of “liberation.” There may be reasons for this, but women empowerment and liberation should never sincerely be offered as justifications.
However Hammarberg did not stop there; he went further and compared such bans with the prospect of criminalizing the Mohammed cartoons that caused such a furor in 2005. Back then Europeans argued very passionately that there must remain room for freedom of expression regardless of the religious implications of some speech. Hammarberg agreed with this view:
The political challenge is to promote diversity and respect for the beliefs of others and at the same time protect freedom of speech. If the wearing of a full-face veil is understood as an expression of a certain opinion, we are talking here about similar or identical rights – though seen from two different angles.
A prohibition of the burqa and the niqab would in my opinion be as unfortunate as it would have been to criminalise the Danish cartoons. Such banning is alien to European values. Instead we should promote multicultural dialogue and respect for human rights.
This may seem like an obvious point, but one that has often been lost in the debate over Islam in Europe. Hopefully Hammarberg’s remarks will remind a few people of the actual values that they are claiming to protect. Such reminders are good for society’s soul and help start the community dialogue that many places in Europe could really use on this issue.
