Men who force women to wear burka would face €15,000 fine in France

Anyone who forced a woman to wear a burka would face a fine of €15,000 (£13,000), according to leaked extracts of a proposed French law banning the face-covering Islamic veil.

Published: 6:23PM BST 30 Apr 2010

While women caught wearing a burka or niqab would face a €150 penalty, President Nicolas Sarkozy would fine those making others wear them one hundred times that amount, and would sentence them to one year in prison.

"No-one may wear in public places clothes that are aimed at hiding the face," says the text of a new law that is to be presented to parliament in July, according to a copy seen by Le Figaro.

The law would create a new offence of "incitement to cover the face for reasons of gender," the centre-Right daily newspaper reported.

The extracts cited did not say whether the law would contain exemptions for people covering up their faces for popular non-religious purposes such as skiing, nor how these exceptions would be defined.

Legislators decided to impose a much smaller fine on women caught wearing the veil in public "because these women are often victims," one of the authors of the law told Le Figaro on condition of anonymity.

Women caught wearing the full veil could choose to attend a "citizenship course" instead of paying the fine, the paper said.

Mr Sarkozy decided this month to opt for a total ban on the full-face veil, despite warnings from the State Council, France's top administrative body, that the law could be struck down as unconstitutional.

The president has declared the burka and the niqab - veils worn by Muslim women in parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf - unwelcome in France, calling them an affront to French values that denigrate women.

There has been a fierce debate in France, home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority of between five and six million, with supporters of a ban arguing that veils are a sign of creeping fundamentalism that must not be allowed to take hold.

But opponents accuse Mr Sarkozy of pandering to the far-Right with such moves and note figures showing that only 1,900 women wear the full veil in France.

Neighbouring Belgium on Thursday became Europe's first country to vote for a ban.

Belgian lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to make covering the face in public a jailable offence, prompting dismay among Muslims and warnings of a dangerous precedent.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7659409/Men-who-force-women-to-wear-burka-would-face-15000-fine-in-France.html