Muslim women in Sri Lanka will not be allowed to wear any form of face veils in public from Monday under new regulations announced by President Maithripala Sirisena, who used emergency powers in the wake of the Easter Sunday bombings.
The new regulation banning any form of face covering was announced by the President on Sunday, a week after the coordinated blasts hit three churches and three luxury hotels, killing over 250 people and injuring more than 500 others.
The ban is to ensure national security, No one should obscure their faces to make identification difficult. He took steps under the emergency regulation to prohibit the use of face coverings of all sorts, which is an obstacle to ensure the identity of the people and a threat to national and public security.
First day of an unprecedented ban on face veils in Sri Lanka, amid a fresh security alert after the Easter Sunday blasts, played out on two levels within the Muslim community that forms nearly 10 per cent of the population: Many women spoke out against the move while the clergy endorsed it for "security reasons" and hoped it would be a temporary measure.
According to the reports On Monday morning, among the first to bear the brunt of the ban were members of a Muslim family a mother and her two daughters who had reached the Maharagama government cancer hospital in Colombo from Trincomalee. "We were not covering our faces, only our heads with scarves. But security personnel at the hospital forced us to remove that, too. When we objected, they said that there is no justification to wear that anymore," the mother told.
