By JANET BAGNALL
The Gazette

Friday, May 15, 2009

In fact, a person in Canada, Australia, Britain and the United States could go an entire lifetime without seeing a Muslim woman whose face is covered with a veil. Yet the right to wear a veil – or not – this year alone has been the subject of court cases in Canada and the U.S. and heated controversy elsewhere.

In Britain, a mother was escorted by police from her son’s school on parent-teacher night because she was wearing a veil. Australian shopkeepers were lobbying this winter to ban customers wearing a face veil – despite there being no police record of anyone wearing a face veil ever being charged with robbing a store.

In Quebec this week, a year after the Bouchard-Taylor report on reasonable accommodation was published, Quebec’s Federation of Women announced that in its view the government should not ban public or para-public workers from wearing religious symbols, including the Islamic veil.

The federation’s position was greeted with outrage. It was accused of having betrayed the very reason for its founding in 1966 – to fight discrimination against women in all its forms.

For it to propose that women be allowed to wear a veil was tantamount, critics said, to advocating that women vanish from public view, buried under swaths of black material.

The intensity of public interest in the Islamic veil is totally disproportionate to its presence. Only 1.5 per cent of Quebec’s 7.5 million people are Muslim and few of them show any evidence of wanting to wear the veil.

Between 2000 and 2005, only two per cent of complaints made to the Quebec Human Rights Commission involved religious freedom, most them by non-immigrants, Quebec author Yolande Geadah pointed out in an interview with Châtelaine magazine last year.

Despite being equally rare in the rest of Canada and the U.S., any time the veil becomes a subject of official concern, it makes headlines.

This week, the Michigan Supreme Court delayed a decision to maintain or revoke a proposed rule to ban the veil. After hearing from the Association of Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, the court said it needed more time to consider the issue.

On Tuesday, the ACLU had described to the court research showing that a judge or jury was less likely to evaluate a witness’s testimony accurately when they relied on facial clues than when they read the testimony or listened to it only.

In Ontario, the question of whether a judge at a preliminary inquiry has the authority to order a complainant to remove her veil when testifying was settled this month, sort of. A higher court ruled that the judge must conduct a thorough hearing into the reasons the witness insists on testifying with a veil before deciding.

Last fall, Ontario Court Justice Norris Weisman ordered a Muslim woman, the alleged victim of a sexual assault, to remove her veil to testify in a preliminary inquiry after he found that her “religious belief is not that strong.”

This speaks to a level of discomfort with the veil, however infrequently encountered, that is a long way from being resolved. Until it is resolved, the few Muslim women who wear a veil face an uncertain reception, not just socially but from the state. This is not fair to them. They have a right, as competent adults, to wear what they want.

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Tags: Human Rights, Muslim Women, Quebec, Veil

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