You can’t come in: First women to appear in French court for wearing banned burkas are refused entry… for wearing a burka

The Daily Mail

By Peter Allen

Last updated at 4:06 PM on 17th June 2011
Defiant: Najat, 37, who decided not to go to courtDefiant: Najat, 37, who decided not to go to court

The first women to be summoned before a European court for illegally wearing burkas were refused entry – because they refused to remove their face coverings.

Najet and Hind who keep their features hidden at all times and refuse to identify themselves beyond their first names, were due to appear before a judge outside Paris.

Both are accused of violating France’s so-called ‘burka ban’, which came into force earlier this year and prevents anyone covering up their faces in public.

But when Hind, a 31-year-old mother, tried to enter the court building in Meaux on Thursday, police held her back, telling her to take her head-covering off.

Najet, meanwhile, simply stayed at home, with the 34-year-old saying she knew she would be stopped from entering.

‘For the hearing to go ahead, you must remove the veil. Justice must be administered in a calm atmosphere,’ police commissioner Philippe Tireloque told Hind.

Hind, who had brought her own handcuffs to wear as part of an organised protest at the court, replied: ‘I’ll keep my veil on at all times – it’s non-negotiable.

‘The law forbids me from expressing myself, and indeed from defending myself. It forces me to dress a certain way, when all I want to do is live according to my religion.’

Police are under strict orders not to remove face coverings themselves, meaning Hind was simply told to leave.

>Victory sign: Three Muslim women in head-to-toe burkas Victory sign: Three Muslim women in head-to-toe burkas

Their court appearance was abandoned, as state prosecutors began trying to work out how they can deal with the challenge to the new law.

They are expected to come to a decision in September.

The accused are both from the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, and were arrested in Meaux on May 5th after travelling to an anti-burka ban protest.

They face fines of £140 and an order to attend compulsory citizenship classes, at which they will be ‘taught’ how to behave as upstanding citizens in a secular republic.

Both deny the charge of covering their faces in a public place, saying the burka ban is ‘unconstitutional’.

A group of around 80 women were at the Meaux court, supporting their ‘sisters’, and saying they would take the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, rather than seeing the defendants punished for what they chose to wear.

Aboufarah Rachid, of the French Institute of Islamic Studies pointed to the fact that both women were from modest backgrounds – they both live on housing estate and have limited incomes.

‘You don’t see rich Saudi Arabian women shopping on the Champs Elysee being cautioned,’ said Mr Rachid. France is the first country in European to implement a full ban on covering up faces in public.

It was primarily introduced to stop Muslim women covering up, with President Nicolas Sarkozy saying that the burka ‘had no place’ in the secular Republic, and immigration minister Eric Besson calling it a ‘walking coffin’.

But police have already branded the ban unworkable, saying they had better things to do than chase after Muslim women wearing burkas or niqab.

Tory backbenchers and the UK Independence Party are among those who have championed a burka ban for Britain, but there are currently no plans to see one introduced.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004695/First-women-appear-court-wearing-banned-burkas-refused-entry–wearing-burka.html#ixzz1PaNhcB1R

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

13 Replies to “You can’t come in: First women to appear in French court for wearing banned burkas are refused entry… for wearing a burka”

  1. I fully understand that this is a serious issue but this is amusing to me.

    ;7))))

  2. I wonder if they will be arrested for not appearing in court, if they are they will have no choice but to remove their covering and be photographed so they can be identified.

  3. I don’t get it. Why doesn’t the judge hit her with contempt of court and give her the option of staying in jail until she takes off the burkha? If that’s forever, then so be it.

  4. What punishment would be meted out to woman in a Muslim country who refused to
    obey an order from her “superiors”? Just a thought.

  5. I hope the authorities realize that these women, obviously on advice from their man and imam, is taking the mickey out of our judicial system. They are showing two fingers to our whole culture and judicial system.

    They and their families and their imam have to be deported. If we ever showed the gumption of backing our own culture to the same degree that these Muslims do, and deporting the lot, Muslim women will quickly abandon the burqa and step into a skirt. Of course it will be sham, as they are working to be majority in Europe, and will do anything to further that outcome.

  6. DP111, I agree with you. whatever those moslems chose to wear, their massive imposing islamic presence would still cause a lot of uneasiness.
    It is another one of their too many negative islamic influence, unpleasant islamic cultural inconsistencies and their tribal irrational arrogance that is causing so much instability and uneasiness in the western world.

  7. I wonder if they realize how incredibly stupid they look in these things. What riles me beyond the obvious is they are living on state benefits because no doubt their burka prevents them from getting a job. They immigrate to France, refuse to work, sit at home all day, shop with the money they receive in welfare from the taxpayer, willingly break the laws they disrespect and when caught, refuse to identify themselves and stick it to the french people again by forcing them to dole out even more money to pay for their defiant choice to be backward.

    But worse and most offensive of all, is they’re just plain stupid. Hind speaks about the law as if she knows what she’s talking about. It’s not French law that forbids her from expressing or defending herself, it’s the sharia law that she follows instead that removes her freedom. She lives in a country whose values guarantee her right to defence and expression yet she chooses to oppress herself. Even in that she has a choice in France, one that is not afforded her in the backward land she came from. But in order to realize this, she’d have to have been educated in….. France? I suspect that too is seen as a limitation to the freedom sharia offers her.

  8. Chris this is a French court, I don ‘t know if they have contempt of court in France, but there was something the Judge could have done. The fact that they didn’t means they don’t intend to enforce the law.

  9. Hopefully they will keep fining them and when they don’t pay, or appear without the halloween costumes, then put them in jail for not paying or not appearing without masks. But who knows about French law?
    In Canada, as I was shocked to learn from Ezras show about a woman who is an anti-abortion protester, who has refused to follow a court order not to protest in front of a medical clinic, and subsequently spent an accumulated 10 years in prision. But her crime was not the actual protest, but not following the court order about likely the place of her protest that got her jailed over and over. One criticism of that blurb, I must send to Ezra, not enough information on that one.
    Hopefully, they can do the same in France, just fine afew times, then jail.

  10. Players, both of them. Each have defied the laws of their respective countries using their personal, religious beliefs as a defence. Such beliefs should never be used to manipulate the legal systems of liberal democracies. These nations already afford an abundance of religious freedom; any demand that they further tailor laws to suit such individual, personal whims is absurd.

  11. You said a mouth full Grace, we are suppose to be a nation of laws and not of people, in a nation of laws everyone is equal under the law, in a nation of people there are special laws for special people. The is why I like to think of the left as neo-feudlists, they want special laws for special people and for the rest of us to have no rights.

  12. No doubt failing to appear in court when you are required to is a serious offense. I am sure she made a very serious grave error by not appearing in court. I suspect the police will have to go to her home and arrest her. She must want to go to prison.