The UN Human Rights Committee has demanded that France review its law banning the burqa, claiming that it violates human rights. Christine Douglass Williams, a human rights activist and former director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, explained to Sputnik why such demands pose a danger.
Christine Williams said in an interview with Sputnik that the UN is exceeding its mandate with demands that France’s burqa ban be lifted. According to her, such laws have been adopted by over a dozen states, not only Western ones, out of security concerns. She added that these countries have the right to ignore the UN ruling if the ban is a matter of national security.
Williams also recalled that the burqa issue is of crucial concern to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which withdrew from the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1990, creating its own human rights declaration based on Sharia. She believes that the UN is playing into the OIC’s hands by trying to repeal the burqa ban in France.
She further questioned how the burqa could be a choice if its use is mandatory in Islam and not wearing it is punishable by imprisonment, lashings or even death. Williams noted that an “incalculable number of women” have suffered abuse for their decision to stop wearing full-body veils.
“Many governments have cowered and prioritized their own fear of being called ‘racist’, ‘Islamophobic’, and ‘xenophobic’ over the security and freedoms of their people,” she concluded.
Source: Sputnik
