خلاصة:
In May of 2018, the strategy of law-making was utilized in the Kingdom
of Denmark to respond to or, more to the point, respond against full-face
garments along the lines of a democratic and secular society in which
values like transparency inform and guide interaction, dialogue, and
communication. The new legal norm and measure, law L 219, does not
refer expressly to the veil, nor to women, or to Islam. Nevertheless, the
national Parliament in the Kingdom of Denmark proceeded on the basis of
premises that reveal, upon scrutiny, why the particular provision that
prohibits full-face veils is widely known and referred to as the “burqa
ban”.Like the niqab, the burqa is a full-face veil. Numerically speaking,
between 50 and 200 Muslim women wear such a veil, a fact that enters
them into a minority within a minority statistics of 0.1 or 0.2 percent.
However, to trivialize the burqa ban would be an error. This point applies
to all sides, including the stakeholders who assumed the responsibility of
drafting the new norm and measure. As the Danish legislators see things,
law 219 is not an instance of “shooting sparrows with a cannon”. After
this, the need to legislate appears to be an instance of following a trend in
Europe and, at the same time, sending a message about the prevailing
(Danish) ideology in contradistinction to “political Islam” that gives rise to
unwanted phenomena like gender inequality, religious extremism, and
terrorism. The authors of The 2018 Danish “Burqa Ban”: Joining a
European Trend and Sending a National Messageattempt to give an indepth
account of the burqa ban and the political context for this, as
provided by the negotiations that led up to the ban’s final adoption. One
objective is to identify the various variables in the legal equation and, as
another objective, capture the wider prescriptively-proscriptive direction
of the Danish case, thereby also establishing a platform for further
discussion, reflection, and response. (This part of the project – an intended
component and outcome since the formulation of the original research
task, labor division, and methodology – is published in the concurrent but
separate article, The Burqa Ban: Legal Precursors for Denmark, American
Experiences and Experiments, and Philosophical and Critical
Examinations.)