News
Monday, April 26, 2010
Majority of French Muslims feel stigmatised in veil row
* Woman recently fined for ‘driving while wearing a burqa’
* Nantes mosques’ association worried, says act goes against values of republicNANTES: Muslims in the French city where a woman was fined for driving wearing a burqa complained of being stigmatised by the affair on Sunday as the political repercussions rumbled on.
With the government planning to ban wearing the burqa in public, the fining of the French woman took a political turn when a minister threatened to punish her Muslim husband for offences including polygamy.
“The Muslims of Nantes...are worried by this systematic stigmatisation which goes against the values of the republic,” the collective of Nantes mosques said in a statement.
The association “considers that the stopping of a driver is a judicial procedure and is angry at how such an event has been turned into being all about Islam”.
The woman has challenged the fine as a breach of her human rights.
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government said last week it would push ahead with a ban on wearing a burqa in public, despite a warning from state legal experts that such a law could be unconstitutional.
In this context, the Nantes incident gained political momentum and dominated the news this weekend.
France Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, alleged the woman’s husband may belong to a radical group and may be a polygamist with four wives and 12 children and guilty of welfare fraud.
Hortefeux wrote to Immigration Minister Eric Besson asking him to look into the allegations and said the man could be stripped of his French nationality if they proved true.
Criticising Hortefeux’s move Nantes Deputy Mayor Jean-Marc Ayrault, said the state authorities had known about the polygamy allegations for some time. “Why are they pretending just now to have discovered the situation?” he said.
The state prosecutor in Nantes, Xavier Ronsin, said that so far no charge had been lodged against the husband, but an investigation could be launched if there were grounds to suspect fraud.
As to whether the man could be stripped of his French nationality, a source close to the investigation said that French law allowed this only in the case of serious crimes against the state such as terrorism, not for polygamy. afp
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk