Swiss voters have narrowly approved a nationwide ban on face coverings that will outlaw full-face Islamic veils, despite opposition from the federal government and the Muslim community.
With only a small number of votes left to be counted on Sunday evening, results showed about 52 per cent of Swiss had backed a proposal to outlaw most face coverings. There are exceptions for medical masks and celebratory carnival-type masks.
Under Switzerland’s system of direct democracy, the referendum result will mean the ban is formally incorporated into the Swiss constitution.
The rightwing populist Swiss People’s party — the largest political party in the wealthy alpine country — campaigned vigorously in support of the measure, which it cast as a stance against religious extremism and political Islam.
But support was markedly lower for the ban in comparison to the 2009 referendum — fought along similar cultural faultlines — in which Switzerland banned the construction of new minarets at mosques.
Voters also narrowly approved a free trade deal with Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country. Just over 51 per cent voted for the pact — a far narrower victory than many in the Swiss political and business community had expected. In particular, opposition to the trade deal from the environmentally conscious Swiss crystallised in recent weeks around the issue of Indonesian palm oil production.
Representatives of Switzerland’s Muslim community condemned the ban on face coverings. “Today’s decision opens old wounds, further expands the principle of legal inequality and sends a clear signal of exclusion to the Muslim minority,” the Central Council of Muslims said in a statement.
While the law does not specifically identify Islam as its target, the referendum is widely referred to in Switzerland as the “burka ban”.
Switzerland is home to some 450,000 Muslims — about 5 per cent of the country’s population. Only a tiny proportion wear full face coverings.
The Italian-speaking canton of Ticino has banned face-veils since 2013 and Denmark, France, Austria, Belgium and Bulgaria have all prohibited the wearing of full Muslim veils in public.
The referendum was triggered in 2017 after 100,000 signatures were collected from Swiss citizens supporting a nationwide vote on the issue.
The Swiss government in Bern declared its opposition to the ban earlier this year, arguing that full face coverings were a marginal phenomenon.
Sunday’s result nevertheless showed a clear majority of Swiss cantons backed the measure, with the exception of the country’s large urban centres. A majority of voters in the cantons of Basel, Bern, Geneva and Zurich rejected the proposal.
“The people have said that the veiling of a woman does not have any place in our culture,” said Walter Wobmann, a parliamentarian for the Swiss Peoples’ party and chairman of the committee that formally proposed the vote. The vote against religious face coverings was a “symbolically” important move, Wobmann said.
The ban is widely opposed by many in the Swiss hospitality industry, who say it will hurt tourism.
“A veiling ban at national level [will] damage Switzerland’s image in Muslim countries in the long term. This would not only affect vacation tourism, but also the [trade] and business sector,” said officials from the influential Association of Swiss Tourism.
“It is a mockery that the [Swiss People’s party] played itself up as the saviour of women in the referendum campaign,” said parliamentarian Tamara Funiciello, co-president of the Swiss Social Democratic party’s women’s movement. Just 30 women in Switzerland actually wore a full niqab, Funiciello added.
“This party considered marital rape as not problematic, denies wage inequality and opposes, still today, any improvement of the situation of women in this country and internationally.”
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2021-03-07 18:31:53Z
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