Europe top court’s burqa ban ruling criticized

Anti-discrimination organizations have expressed shock after Europe’s top court upheld France’s controversial ban on burqa, Press TV reports.

The criticism came a day after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled to uphold France’s controversial law of banning full-face veils in public.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the UK human rights group, Liberty, said the burqa ban “has nothing to do with gender equality and everything to do with rising racism in Western Europe.”

France’s so-called burqa ban came into force in 2010, after then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, approved the law banning face veils in public spaces, which has been fully backed by the current Socialist government.

The controversial law has sparked an angry reaction on the part of the Muslim community.

Under the ban, women wearing full-face veils in public spaces can be fined up to 150 euros (USD 205).

There are fewer than 2,000 women wearing a full-face veil in France, which is home to five million Muslims — the largest Muslim community in the EU.

This is while a spokesperson for the police officers union has once stated that the French police have many other problems to solve.

Similar bans have been approved in Belgium and some parts of Switzerland, with other European countries considering a comparable ban.