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GUARDIAN Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:11:01 GMT
Muslim witness in Australia fraud trial told she must remove her full veil while giving evidence
A Muslim witness in an Australian fraud trial must remove her full veil while giving evidence, a judge has ruled.
Western Australia district court judge Shauna Deane said it would be inappropriate for the woman to testify with her face covered by the niqab but did not specify what the woman could wear. The judge said the woman's decision to wear the full veil came down to "reasons of modesty" and a "personal preference" in her interpretation of Islam, rather than a religious requirement.
Defence attorneys argued that the jury needs to be able to see the witness's facial expressions to assess what she says, while prosecutors said the woman's discomfort without the garment could affect her testimony.
Deane stressed that her decision applied only to this case and was not setting a precedent for other courts, but the issue has sparked national interest and drawn comparisons to France and Belgium, where there are efforts to ban the wearing of Islamic face veils. In Australia, some Muslims wear head scarves, but burqas which cover the entire face are almost never worn.
The woman is an Islamic studies teacher who has been identified only by her first name, Tasneem. She is 36, has lived in Australia for seven years and has worn a burqa since she was 17.
She is a prosecution witness in a case against the director of a company that ran a Muslim women's college in Perth. The director, Anwar Sayed, is accused of inflating the number of students at the school in 2006 and 2007 to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal grants.
Prosecutor Mark Ritter told the court that Tasneem usually removes the burqa only when she is with her family.
The judge did not say whether the woman would be able to testify via video.
The burqa debate has prompted comments from politicians campaigning ahead of Australia's federal election on Saturday. Earlier this month, opposition leader Tony Abbott – who hopes to become prime minister – said he found the garments "confronting" and wished fewer Australians wore them.
The first jury in Sayed's case was discharged earlier this month after the trial time ballooned from the original estimate of 10 days to five weeks, which caused attendance issues for several jurors. The trial will resume with a new jury in October.
Islam
Australia
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GUARDIAN Thu, 20 May 2010 07:29:26 GMT
Angela Merkel's crackdown on speculators may be the beginning of a terrifying scorched-earth policy
German efforts to seize back control of the European debt crisis were met with snorts of derision in London. Investors could not decide whether the ban on short-selling was an ill-conceived gaffe, or a desperate piece of political posturing. But German chancellor Angela Merkel may have the last laugh.
Tuesday's late-night announcement from Frankfurt regulator BaFin did nothing to calm the markets. The ban applies only to speculators trying to bet against eurozone debt in Germany. With most of the action carried out in London and New York, and other European regulators failing to fall in behind, it looked doomed from the start. Instead, the euro took the strain again, falling to new lows. At best, the move was dismissed as a political red herring, designed only to shore up domestic German support before a vote on the Greek bailout plan. At worst, many viewed it as a naive misunderstanding of how the market really functions.
To an extent, the European emphasis on blaming the speculators is misplaced. Talk of a "wolfpack" of traders and credit rating agencies hunting down the weaker members of the eurozone ignores the fact that these are the same people indebted nations need to persuade to lend them more money. Attempts to prevent them from short-selling seem based on a misconception that governments can simply demand the confidence of investors. What next, asked the City wags; will Germany ban other teams scoring goals at the World Cup?
But a closer reading of what Merkel has said on the matter suggests something more significant is going on. In language more confrontational than any yet used by European leaders, the chancellor first pointed out she wanted to "ensure that banks cannot extort the state anymore". Extortion is a strong word in any language, but reflects mounting anger over the way financial markets have emerged from the world's three-year banking crisis with an even greater hold over nation states than when they went in. The unspoken threat is that Europe's biggest economy has had enough and is preparing to take its ball away.
Lest anyone think this is an idle threat, Merkel called on Europe to "develop a process for an orderly state insolvency" – in other words work out how to let countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal simply refuse to repay their debts. It might sound obvious to those on the outside, but this flies in the face of everything Europe has been trying to do and would set in train colossal losses for banks, pension funds and investors everywhere. There is no guarantee it would make life any easier for the Greeks either. Instead of having to bring public spending in line with tax revenues slowly, a decision to effectively turn its back on the financial markets would mean having to balance the books overnight – a huge wrench for a country already in the grips of a deep recession.
But Merkel's comments do at last begin to acknowledge what many observers have been saying for weeks now: lending yet more money to Greece and other over-indebted nations can only ever be a temporary sticking plaster. The IMF and EU austerity plan already envisages such sharp falls in Greek GDP that an extreme solution may not longer look so intolerable.
It would also explain some of the appetite for the ban on short-selling shares in German banks. If Merkel really is preparing to hit the market with a Lehman Brothers style default that would rock banks across Europe, the last thing she wants is for lots of speculators to get rich in the process. Those patronising voices in London need to remember similar measures were put in place by the Financial Services Authority and the US Securities and Exchange Commission in New York during the banking crisis. To many the notion of an "orderly insolvency" is an oxymoron, but to those who believe the global debt crisis is entering its final stage, it is perhaps the best......
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GUARDIAN Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:04:10 GMT
Belgium to outlaw burqas and niqabs in public but human rights campaigners say ban violates religious freedom
Belgium's parliament is expected to pass a law today that would ban Islamic veils in public, making it the first European country to ban the wearing of the burqa or niqab.
The bill, which has been criticised by human rights campaigners as a violation of the fundamental right to freedom of religion, was voted for unanimously by the lower chamber's home affairs committee last month.
The law would make it a crime to be in a public place with one's face partially or wholly concealed in a way that would make identification impossible. Violators would be subject to a fine of €15-€25 (£12-£21) with a possible prison sentence of one to seven days.
There are no official statistics on how many women wear face-covering veils, though analysts agree it is a marginal phenomenon among the roughly 400,000 Muslims living in Belgium (about 4% of the country's population). In 2009, 29 women were stopped by police in eight municipalities in the Brussels region that already ban the full Muslim veil.
A similar move is being considered in France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered legislation paving the way for a total ban on the full Islamic veil. Sarkozy is moving ahead on the ban despite the advice of experts who warned that such a broad ban risked contravening France's constitution.
Sarkozy has repeatedly said that such clothing oppresses women and is "not welcome" in France. A government spokesman, Luc Chatel, said after yesterday's weekly cabinet meeting that the president decided the government should submit a bill to parliament in May on an overall ban on burqa-like veils.
"The ban on veils covering the whole face should be general, in every public space, because the dignity of women cannot be put in doubt," Chatel said.
The decision to seek a full ban, rather than a limited ban, came as a surprise. After a cabinet meeting just a week ago, the government spokesman announced a decision for legislation that bans the veil but takes into account conclusions by the council of state, France's highest administrative office.
The council advised that a full ban would be "legally very fragile". A six-month parliamentary inquiry concluded that a full ban would raise constitutional issues, as well as enforcement problems.
Muslim leaders in France say that the face-covering veil is not a religious requirement of Islam but have cautioned against banning the garment. Of France's estimated five million Muslims, only a tiny minority wear the full veil. Some critics of the ban have warned that such a move will serve merely to reinforce the alienation of those women from mainstream society.
Human Rights Watch has strongly criticised planned legislation to ban face-covering veils on human rights and practical grounds.
"Bans like this lead to a lose-lose situation," said Judith Sunderland, senior western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch. "They violate the rights of those who choose to wear the veil and do nothing to help those who are compelled to do so."
The group argues that there is no evidence that wearing the full veil in public threatens public safety, public order, health, morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others – the only legitimate grounds for interference with fundamental rights, it said. Rather than help women who are coerced into wearing the veil, a ban would limit, if not eliminate, their ability to seek advice and support.
Belgium
Islam
France
Nicolas Sarkozy
Religion
Mark Tran
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