Oslo To Ban Muslim Headdress In Schools
Shaveta Bansal - All Headline News Staff Writer Oslo, Norway (AHN) - Adding to the list of European countries, the Norwegian capital also plans to ban the Muslim headdress in Oslo's schools. Oslo's city council have been told by lawyers at the Ministry of Education that the ban wouldn't be illegal under Norwegian law. According to a report by Reuters, the council wants to ban the burqa or niqab, which covers the face, insisting that teachers cannot do their job properly without seeing their students' faces, the head of the city's education department Toerger Odegaard said. "We will introduce a ban after the summer holidays at the end of August," he told Reuters on Wednesday. France has recently banned the headdress for teachers at schools. In December the Dutch parliament voted in favor of banning burqas, and the Belgian town of Maaseik also banned the religious wearing through an existing law which required people to be identifiable in public. The move has annoyed Muslims in Norway, which has large Pakistani and Somali minorities concentrated mainly in Oslo, who argue that the ban was an encroachment on personal freedom. "We have been having a discussion about whether you should wear the niqab or not, but making laws which ban it is just going too far," said Fakhra Salimi, the head of MiRA a partly state-sponsored group that helps female immigrants in Norway. She said women over the age of 16 should be al |
