German interior minister mulling ban on full-face veils

Germany’s interior minister will propose a number of security measures, including a ban on the full-face veil for women, in reaction to growing concerns about violent attacks in the country.

According to German media, the measures, which the interior ministry will try to turn into law before national elections in 2017, include boosting police numbers and video surveillance at railway stations and airports, making it easier for doctors to break confidentiality agreements if their patients are planning criminal acts, and tightening rules around obtaining dual nationality.

The federal interior minister, the Christian Democrat (CDU) MP Thomas de Maizière, is expected to present details of a number of initiatives on Thursday, with the official presentation of the so-called Berlin declaration to follow at a conference of German state interior ministers on 18 August.

Earlier this month, southern Germany saw a spate of violent attacks, three of which involved asylum seekers and two of which were later claimed by Islamic State.

A ban on full face veils worn by some Muslim women, similar to the “ban on face covering” passed in France, was recently proposed by Jens Spahn, one of the up-and-coming figures on the right wing of Angela Merkel’s party.

The ban, as well as the revoking of laws around dual nationality are likely to prove highly controversial and could run into legal difficulty.

Gökay Sofuoglu, the national chair of the Turkish community in Germany, described the proposal as populist. “How would one go about putting that into practice? Burqas are at the most worn by tourists from Saudi-Arabia,” Sofuoglu told the Mannheimer Morgen newspaper.

Frank Tempel, of leftwing party Die Linke who is a deputy chair of the federal committee for internal affairs, said in particular the proposal to ban the burqa was “pandering to the pub room chatter of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland”.

“We’re a year away from a federal election and the AfD is of course taking lots of votes away from the conservative camp. It has nothing to do with traditional religious freedom, it has nothing to do with many principles that have long been argued over … But that does not have anything to do with the fight against terror or with … fighting extremism.”

Arnold Plickert, the deputy chair of the police trades union, welcomed the proposal to increase the number of police personnel, saying that Germany’s internal security had been “squeezed to death” in the past few years due to financial cuts. “Across Germany, police are trying to work off 20m hours of overtime – that equates to 1,150 jobs that are in effect missing,” he said.