BERLIN – Swiss voters narrowly approved a proposal on Sunday to ban facial coverings, both the niqabs and burqas worn by some Muslim women in the country, as well as the ski masks and bandanas worn by the protesters.
The move will make it illegal to cover your face in public places like restaurants, stadiums, public transport or just walking on the street. It provides for exceptions in religious places and for safety or health reasons, such as masks that people now use to protect themselves against COVID-19, as well as at traditional carnival parties. The authorities have two years to write detailed legislation.
Two Swiss cantons or states, Ticino and St. Gallen, already have similar legislation that provides for fines for violations. National legislation will bring Switzerland into line with countries like Belgium and France, which have already enacted similar measures.
The Swiss government opposed the measure as excessive, arguing that full-face coverage is a “marginal phenomenon”. He argued that the ban could harm tourism – most Muslim women who wear these veils in Switzerland are visitors from wealthy Persian Gulf countries, who are often drawn to Swiss lake-side cities.
Experts estimate that at most a few dozen Muslim women wear full face covers in the country of 8.5 million people.
Supporters of the proposal, which came to a vote five years after it was launched, argued that facial coverage symbolizes repression of women and said the move is necessary to maintain a basic principle that faces should be shown in a free society like Da Switzerland.
In the end, 51.2% of voters supported the plan. There were majorities against six of Switzerland’s 26 cantons – including those that include the country’s three largest cities, Zurich, Geneva and Basel, and the capital Bern. Public television SRF reported that voters in several popular tourist destinations, including Interlaken, Lucerne and Zermatt, rejected it.
Supporters included the nationalist Swiss People’s Party, the strongest in parliament. The commission that launched the proposal is led by party parliamentarian Walter Wobmann and also initiated a ban on building new minarets that voters approved in 2009.
A coalition of left-wing parties that oppose the proposal put up posters before the referendum that said: “Absurd. Useless. Islamophobic. “
Wobmann told SRF that the initiative addressed both “a symbol of a completely different value system … extremely radical Islam” and security against “hooligans”. He said that “this has nothing to do with symbolic politics”.
Voters gave their opinion on two other issues on Sunday. They clearly rejected a voluntary “electronic identity” proposal to improve the security of online transactions – an idea that clashed with privacy advocates, since it would have been issued by private companies – and narrowly approved a free trade agreement with Indonesia.