UK must outlaw use of burqa, say protesters

Protesters have renewed calls for Britain to outlaw the burqa after Italy became the latest European country to consider a ban.

Politicians yesterday proposed a law to make the Muslim cover-up gear illegal just months after France suggested doing the same, the Daily Star reports.

Diana Nammi, of the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, in London, said: "We're against burqas and support bans anywhere in the world.

"We would like to see them made illegal in the UK. They're very dangerous against women. A burqa is a code of dress of the most fundamentalist part of religion and is not progressive. It's like an individual cell for a woman to be hidden in, made invisible, and to deny a woman is a human being," Nammi was quoted, as saying.

She spoke out after MPs from Italy's anti-immigration Northern League, part of the ruling right-wing coalition, called for a ban.

It proposed amending a 1975 anti-terror law that allows "justified cause" for covering up, including religious reasons.