France plans to jail burka-enforcers: report

France will jail and impose huge fines on anyone who forces a Muslim woman to wear a full-face veil, as well as fining the wearer, according to leaked extracts of a proposed law published Friday.

While women will face a 150-euro penalty if they choose to don a burka or a niqab, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to slap one-year prison terms and 15,000-euro ($20,000) fines on those who make others wear them.

"No-one may wear in public places clothes that are aimed at hiding the face," says the text of a new law that is to be presented to parliament in July, according to a copy seen by the pro-government newspaper Le Figaro.

The law will create a new offence of "incitement to cover the face for reasons of gender," the paper said, and this offence will incur a 15,000 euro fine and a year in prison.

The extracts cited did not say whether the law would contain exemptions for people covering up their faces for popular non-religious purposes such as skiing, nor how these exceptions would be defined.

Legislators decided to impose a much smaller fine on women caught wearing the veil in public "because these women are often victims," one of the authors of the law told Le Figaro on condition of anonymity.

Women caught wearing the full veil can choose to attend a "citizenship course" instead of paying the fine, the paper said.

Total ban

Sarkozy decided this month to opt for a total ban on the full-face veil, despite warnings from the State Council, France's top administrative body, that the law could be struck down as unconstitutional.

The president has declared the burka and the niqab -- veils worn by Muslim women in parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf -- unwelcome in France, calling them an affront to French values that denigrate women.

There has been a fierce debate in France, home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority of between five and six million, with supporters of a ban arguing that veils are a sign of creeping fundamentalism that must not be allowed to take hold.

But opponents accuse Sarkozy of pandering to the far-right with such moves and note figures showing that only 1,900 women wear the full veil in France.

Neighboring Belgium on Thursday became Europe's first country to vote for a ban.

Belgian lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to make covering the face in public a jailable offence, prompting dismay among Muslims and warnings of a dangerous precedent.

One of the lawmakers behind the proposed French ban, Andre Gerin of the Communist Party, said he was "delighted" by the Belgian law.

"This is the path France is preparing to take," he said in a statement on Friday. "The law must be a law for the liberation of women and at the same time a law to fight against gurus and fundamentalists."