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A referendum is held in Switzerland on Sunday to decide whether or not to approve a controversial bill that would prohibit full coverage in public and which has been defined by the Swiss media as the law on the “prohibition of burqa”. The proposal does not explicitly refer to Muslim women, but the party that promotes it the most has not hidden that the main objective is to ban the clothes that some of them wear to cover their faces completely, such as the burqa or burqa. the niqab. According to the latest available polls, around 60 percent of the Swiss population would favor the proposal, which is instead judged by others as racist and Islamophobic.
The proposal to hold a referendum was presented in 2016 by a commission that included several exponents of the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), a right-wing conservative party, the largest in the National Council and currently in government, which today is one of the main defenders of the law.
In the campaign for the referendum, the SVP has often tried to associate the covered face of Muslim women with Islamic religious extremism, arguing, among other things, that showing the face is one of the most important symbols of freedom of religion. people in Switzerland. In 2009, the SVP also promoted another referendum that prohibited the construction of new minarets, that is, the towers adjacent to the mosques from where the call to prayer is broadcast, 5 times a day.
Currently, the ban on face covering in public is in effect in two Swiss cantons, Ticino and St. Gallen, which had organized autonomous local consultations shortly after the 2016 proposal.
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In Switzerland, Muslims make up 5% of the approximately 8.5 million inhabitants and come mainly from Turkey, Bosnia and Kosovo.
The Islamic community living in Switzerland denies that the law does not allow women to freely profess their religion and argues that introducing it would be discrimination. Furthermore, according to Muslim feminists and activists, the law is also sexist, because it aims to control women’s bodies and limit their self-determination.
The Swiss government officially came out against the proposal and asked voters to reject it. One of the main reasons is that the imposition of the law at the national level would limit the sovereignty of individual cantons, especially since the voters of three cantons have already rejected it in local consultations. In addition, according to an estimate by the government spokesman, Muslim women who wear a headdress that completely conceals their face in Switzerland are very few, “between 36 and 130”.
The government has made a counterproposal, which at this point, however, can only be discussed if the law is not passed: to force people to uncover the face only in cases where it is necessary for identification by the authorities. .
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In Europe there are already several countries where there are similar bans, more or less openly directed at garments such as the niqab and the burqa: these include, for example, France, Denmark and the Netherlands. Due to the mandatory nature of the mask due to the coronavirus pandemic, in the last year many newspapers have talked about how covering the face can be a duty and a prohibited practice at the same time.
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