Yasmeen Ali was attempting to enter Hastings District Court on Tuesday to support her brother Carlos Manuel Brooking, 22, who was appearing for sentencing on a charge of assault.
Ms Ali, a 25-year-old mother-of-three, was asked by a court attendant to remove her headscarf on entering the courthouse. She refused and took a seat. When she tried to re-enter court after the morning break, she was blocked. She complained to the court manager, who told her she could not enter wearing a headscarf because the judge, Geoff Rea, had forbidden it.
Her brother had earlier been put into custody after refusing to remove a hat while sitting in court awaiting his sentencing, despite being requested to do so by Judge Rea.
Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres today called for reassurance for the Muslim community. ”I can’t imagine a nun being told to remove such attire, and the same should apply to others who wear head coverings for religious reasons, such as Muslims, Sikhs and Jews,” he said.
Judicial communications adviser Neil Billington said the incident was the result of Judge Rea’s “mistaken assumption of what was occurring in the courtroom”.
“The judge required the removal of the woman because of her association with [her brother] who had just been removed. The judge had mistakenly assumed that her headgear was a demonstration of protest at the court.”
Dominion Post, 3 September 2009
See also 3News, 3 September 2009
Dozens of protesters sported party hats, colanders and other unlikely headgear in protests Tuesday at schools in the Belgian city of Antwerp where authorities have banned girls from wearing the Muslim veil.
Muslim women have been banned from wearing the body-concealing swimming costume known as a burqini in the northern Italian town of Varallo Sesia, according to a report.
“We don’t want to see burqas in Denmark. We simply can’t accept that some of our citizens walk around with their faces covered,” Naser Khader, a Danish member of parliament of Syrian-Palestinian extraction who was recently appointed spokesman for integration issues for the Conservative Party, told the newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
“When most of us think of militant Islam, we tend to think in terms of suicide bombs on London buses, planes flying into Twin Towers and 19-year olds getting their limbs blown off by Taliban IEDs. But as any extremist Imam could tell you, there are at least two ways in which a good Muslim can further the ongoing struggle to convert the whole world from the House of War (that’s the non-Muslim world) to the House of Islam (ie global submission to the will of Allah): one (see above) is by poison or the sword; the other is by honey.