The current debate over whether Fouzya Salim and Feraiba Razamjoo should be required to remove their veils in court is an inevitable tension arising from immigration. The question of how far incoming and receiving cultures accommodate to each other is not simply resolved. Let’s remember that the last major wave of immigrants deal with it by killing lots of tangata whenua, stealing most of their land and attempting to annihilate their culture.

There are no simple solutions to these matters, but there seems to be a general demand for simplistic answers. Brian Rudman’s column in Friday’s Herald (29.10.04), and Professor Bill Hodge’s appearance on Agenda on Saturday both demonstrated the tendency for even intelligent people to oversimplify the issues.

My view is that ultimately the court will decide that the veils must be removed. The emphasis on formal procedural fairness in our justice system will, I think, require it. Still, there are a number of aspects to the case that concern me.

The first, and least important, is that the clamour to force the women to remove their veils seem based as much on assumptions of cultural superiority as on the facts of the actual case. As in France, where muslim girls are forbidden to wear headscarves at school, the objective seems to be to force muslim women to do away with manifestations of their ‘backward religion’, and to make them realise that they are being oppressed.

I am no fan of the burka. It does seem to me, though, that muslim women have the right to determine for themselves where the sharp end of their struggle for equality manifests. I suspect that New Zealander’s antipathy to the burka is as much about its ‘otherness’ as about our concern for the difficulties experienced by muslim women, whether in Afghanistan or in Aotearoa.

Secondly, if muslim women are required to remove their veils against their will, this is likely to make women from those cultures averse to participating in judicial proceedings. If women are discouraged from seeking the help of police when suffering domestic or other violence, for example, because they face an additional humiliation in court, how does this serve justice?

Lastly, I sympathise with the defence lawyers, who claim that their clients are disadvantaged by not being able to see the demeanor of the witnesses for the prosecution. However I wonder how Colin Amery expects himself, or a judge or jury, to assess the facial demeanour and bodily language of a woman who has been forced by the court to do what I can only guess is their equivalent of being stripped naked in front of strangers.

In addition, even without their embarassment, these women come from a culture so alien to Mr Amery and the judge that women are required to wear veils. I doubt the judge or jury will have any idea what their facial gestures might mean. Most Pakeha New Zealanders have enough trouble understanding the body language of Samoans, never mind Afghanis.

As I stated at the beginning, I think that in the interest of formal procedural fairness, that ultimately the court will have to decide that the women testify without a veil. If so, I hope that a way can be found to humiliate them as little as possible. I also wish that our collective discussions of such matters was a little less self-satisfied.

Do you think Muslin women should be required to remove veils in court?

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