This week, Italian Premier, Giorgia Meloni, announced a set of measures she plans to introduce in a bill to combat “Islamic separatism.”
As well as banning face coverings in public places in a bid to outlaw the Burqa, the bill sets out criminal penalties for virginity testing and forced marriages, adding religious coercion as grounds for prosecution. It also seeks to trace foreign funding for Islamic organisations to ensure they pose no threat to state security.
These seem like perfectly viable demands of the state in order to prevent, and I quote “religious radicalisation and religiously motivated hatred”. In fact, Italy is not the first European state to ban the Burqa.
France introduced legislation first in 2011. Since then more than 20 states have some form of full-face coverings in public, including Austria, Denmark, Tunisia, Belgium, Turkey, Sri Lanka, the Netherlands and Switzerland. And in important news to Sir International Law Starmer - the ECHR has upheld all of these bans, ruling that states may restrict such garments to protect “living together” in society.
Now the Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, Ebba Busch, has called for a burqa ban ‘while we can’ as she condemned her country’s ‘failed integration’.
While I cheer European lawmakers like Meloni, I still feel as though there is a timidity in going after the low-hanging fruit.
It is logical and rational to prohibit something that prevents normal social interaction, that could be used to conceal identity for nefarious reasons and is a symbol of misogynistic repression. But is forbidding an item of clothing enough to unpick the societal divides and ideological clashes between communities? Is making illegal practices that technically already are illicit under existing criminal law going to suddenly alter the fabric of multiculturalism?
But will it solve the problem of increasing disquiet over the relationship between Islam and the West?
Coming up:
The dangerous hold of The Muslim Brotherhood in Britain.
UK Muslim attitudes - Percentages that will shock
What Britain needs to do next - The Necessary Strident Measures