Copahegan, January 21: Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen has dismissed face-veils wore by some Muslim women as unwelcome in the Scandinavian country, vowing to restrict them, reported.
“Neither the burqa nor the niqab have their place in Danish society,” Rasmussen has asserted during his weekly press conference.
“We meet each other at eye level, where we can see each other and where we gesticulate with each other.”
The comments came a day after a report, commissioned by the Social Affairs Ministry and done by University of Copenhagen researchers, showed that face-veils are only worn by between 100 and 200 Muslim women in the country.
Denmark is home to some 100,000 Muslim women, who represent about 1.9 percent of the country’s total population of 5.5 million.
But the prime minister insisted that he is opposed to the principle of face-covering.
“If there was a situation in which my son was being taught in a Danish public school by a teacher in niqab, I couldn’t care less whether this was a fate he shared with three, or three hundred classes in Denmark,” he said.
“It’s one niqab too many.”
While hijab is an obligatory code of dress for Muslim women, the majority of Muslim scholars agree that a woman is not obliged to wear a face veil.
Scholars believe it is up to each woman to decide whether to cover her face or not.
Restriction
The Danish premier said his centre-right government was mulling ways of limiting face-veil without violating the constitution.
“They symbolize a view of women and humanity that we totally oppose and that we want to combat in Danish society,” Rasmussen insisted.
“That is why we don’t want to see this garment in Danish society.”
But Rasmussen stopped short of calling for a ban on the face-veils, citing “legal and other limits.”
The issue has stirred a heated debate in the Scandinavian country and has divided the two-party coalition government since the summer.
The far-right Danish People’s Party, the government’s key parliamentary ally, has been pressing the government for action on face-veils.
A call by the right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP) for a blanket ban on burqa has drawn rebuke from British politicians and officials as a violation of religious freedom rights.
France is already drafting a bill to ban the face-veil and fin Muslim women who do that.
-Agencies