First Case, Fine French Police Woman Wearing a veil in Shopping Center (Tuesday, April 12, 2011 17:52 pm)

First Case, Fine French Police Woman Wearing a veil in Shopping Center (Tuesday, April 12, 2011 17:52 pm)

REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, Versailles - French police fined a woman for wearing Islamic headscarves or full-face veil, a first case reported in the first day the ban comes into force, according to police sources said Tuesday. The young woman, who was born in 1983, was fined 150 euros or the equivalent of 216 dollars "without incident" at a shopping center in Mureaux, in the northwest of Paris, Monday afternoon, according to this source, without elaborating on what types of clothing she was wearing.

France on Monday became the first country in Europe which imposed a ban on wearing a full face coverings, including the Islamic niqab. At least two women wearing the niqab was arrested on the same day for protesting the ban. French police have voiced concerns that the law would be impossible to meet because they have not been empowered on the use of force to remove the head covering, and could face opposition in the districts of immigrants who have been tense.

But Interior Minister Claude Gueant, on Monday, insisting that the ban will be fully implemented, the name of "secularism and equality between men and women ... two principles that we can not compromise." "The police are there to apply the law and they will apply the law," he said.

The law shall come into force at times full of tension between the countries and Muslim minorities of France, where Sarkozy was accused stigmatize Islam to win back votes from the rise of the right group. French officials estimate that only about 2,000 women, of the total Muslim population is estimated at between four and six million, who wore full-face veil, the traditional clothing in some parts of the Arab world and South Asia.

Many Muslim and human rights activists say that the right-wing president made one of the most vulnerable groups in France as a target to give a signal to the anti-immigration voters that he shared their fears if Islam is a threat to French culture.