The government is expected to present legislation next week to outlaw face-covering veils on the grounds that they are demeaning to women, even though legal experts have warned that such a prohibition could violate religious freedom.

“What we want is efficiency rather than symbolism,” Jean-Marc Ayrault, head of the Socialists’ group in parliament, told reporters.

The Socialist draft says that everyone must keep their face uncovered when using public services to permit identification.

In practice, this could mean women would have to remove face veils to pick up their children from school, or during wedding ceremonies at town halls.

Several human rights organisations have spoken out against a general prohibition on veils such as the burqa and the niqab.

A committee of the Council of Europe — a European human rights body based in Strasbourg — also said on Tuesday it opposed such a ban, which is being discussed in France as well as Belgium.

The Socialist proposal could circumvent concerns over religious discrimination by focusing on security and pragmatism.

“We believe that banning it from the public sphere… risks stigmatising people and above all being totally ineffective because it would be unenforceable,” Socialist leader Martine Aubry told reporters after meeting Prime Minister Francois Fillon to discuss the issue.

But she stressed the Socialists opposed full Islamic veils and did not want them in France.

The Council of Europe committee, whose position will be debated by the 47 member states, said full veils “could be a threat to women’s dignity”, but women should be free to wear them if they wanted to.

However, the committee said legal restrictions might be justified for security purposes and in certain situations where the wearer’s face had to be seen.

The idea of a ban was first floated last year by French mayors who said more and more women were turning up fully veiled at schools and in town halls, and refusing to show their faces even for the purpose of identification.

(Additional reporting by Laure Bretton, editing by Paul Taylor)

The decision is part of a broader effort by some European museums to return artifacts plundered by explorers, giving in to pressure from communities around the world who want to bring home their dead and lay them to rest.

“From a ritual showing the respect of a tribe and family toward their dead, the mummified heads became the object of a particularly barbaric trade due to the curiosity of travelers and European collectors,” Parliamentary Relations Minister Henri de Raincourt said when he presented the law last week.

It is the first time that a French law has authorized the return of an entire category of museum items, rather than a specific object, and marks a success for activists campaigning for the restitution of bodies and antiquities.

U.S. and European museums have long resisted such claims, fearing they would lead to the departure of prized mummies and other archaeological treasures.

New Zealand has demanded the return of the heads since the 1980s. The dispute became a national issue in France only when the Rouen town council voted in 2007 to give back a head kept in its Natural History Museum since 1875.

That decision was annulled, with France’s Culture Ministry saying at the time it could not be made at the local level.

The new law, which was approved almost unanimously, will apply to more than a dozen Maori heads kept in French museums. They will be shipped to the Te Papa museum in Wellington before being handed to different tribes for burial.

Featuring elaborate tattoos as a sign of strength and courage, heads of Maori warriors were traditionally displayed to their tribes as objects of veneration.

Western explorers brought them to Europe and the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, resulting in a thriving trade. Hundreds of such heads still lie in the depths of U.S. and European collections along with other body parts.

In 2002, France handed back the body of Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman who was taken to Europe in the 19th century and exhibited as the “Hottentot Venus.”

Parts of her body had been displayed at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris until 1974.

The decision is part of a broader effort by some European museums to return artifacts plundered by explorers, giving in to pressure from communities around the world who want to bring home their dead and lay them to rest.

“From a ritual showing the respect of a tribe and family toward their dead, the mummified heads became the object of a particularly barbaric trade due to the curiosity of travellers and European collectors,” Parliamentary Relations Minister Henri de Raincourt said when he presented the law last week.

It is the first time that a French law has authorized the return of an entire category of museum items, rather than a specific object, and marks a success for activists campaigning for the restitution of bodies and antiquities.

U.S. and European museums have long resisted such claims, fearing they would lead to the departure of prized mummies and other archaeological treasures.

New Zealand has demanded since the 1980s that the heads be returned. The dispute only turned into a national issue in France when the council in the town of Rouen voted in 2007 to give back a head kept in its Natural History Museum since 1875.

That decision was annulled because it did not follow the formal procedure for handling public artifacts. The new law, which has cross-party support, will apply to more than a dozen Maori heads kept in French museums.

Featuring elaborate tattoos as a sign of strength and courage, heads of Maori warriors were traditionally displayed to their tribes as objects of veneration.

Western explorers brought them to Europe and the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, resulting in a thriving trade. Hundreds of such heads still lie in the depths of U.S. and European collections along with other body parts.

In 2002, France handed back the body of Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman who was taken to Europe in the 19th century and exhibited as the “Hottentot Venus”.

Parts of her body had been displayed at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris up until 1974.

The case of Lies Hebbadj, an Algerian-born butcher who became a citizen when he married a French woman in 1999, has flared into a major political row with opposition parties accusing the government of exploiting the situation.

The story came to light Friday, when Hebbadj’s wife, Anne, complained she had been fined for driving while wearing an Islamic veil, which police said was dangerous.

The government, which days earlier announced it planned to ban the full veil from the streets of France, said Hebbadj appeared to have several wives and suggested that he lose his French nationality.

But Hebbadj denied having more than one wife, saying other women he has had children with were his lovers.

“If one can be stripped of one’s French nationality for having mistresses, then many French could lose theirs,” he said.

A person can see their French passport taken away if they acquired it through fraud — if, for instance, Hebbadj hid an existing marriage when he married Anne. Mistresses, however, are hardly unusual in France, where former President Francois Mitterrand maintained a hidden, second family for years.

The French government has said it has information that Hebbadj is married to four women with 12 children and accuses them of fraudulently claiming single parent benefits.

“If the French consider that fraudulent polygamy and benefit claims shouldn’t be allowed, then … we could well imagine a change to the law,” Immigration Minister Eric Besson told RTL radio Monday, suggesting a tightening of legislation.

Frederic Lefebvre, a spokesman for the ruling UMP party, accused Hebbadj of being “someone whom we can well suspect of practicing polygamy, which is against the principles of our society, for financial aims.”

Last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy backed a strict public ban of veils such as the burqa or niqab, a legal gamble given constitutional guarantees on freedom of religion.

Defending the burqa ban and still smarting from a beating in last month’s regional elections, Sarkozy has revived a strident tone popular with many voters of his center-right coalition.

“If the constitutional court rejects a law that defends the dignity of women, we need to question that court and the judges,” the Journal du Dimanche newspaper quoted him as saying.

(Additional reporting by Guillaume Frouin, Clement Guillou and Yann Le Guernigou, editing by Lin Noueihed)

Relations between France and China hit a low in 2008 when
protesters disrupted the passage of the Olympic torch through
Paris and Sarkozy met Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

While Sarkozy may bring up the subject of human rights to
placate voters at home, the focus will be on charming China, a
key player in top diplomatic disputes as well as one of France’s
main rivals in Africa in its quest for raw materials.

Underlining the importance France places on China, the April
28-30 stay will be Sarkozy’s fourth trip to China since his
election in 2007, and his second full state visit.

His wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, often skips his overseas
voyages, but she will be by his side this week and together they
will open France’s pavilion at the World Expo in Shanghai.

Sarkozy will meet President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen
Jiabao, with officials hoping the encounters will help along
talks over a new round of United Nations sanctions against Iran.

China would like to water down the proposed punitive
measures and the talks are progressing only slowly, Western
diplomats and officials say. Iran is China’s third-biggest crude
oil supplier, after Saudi Arabia and Angola.

“It’s out of the question that importers will be victims of
any sanctions,” said a source close to Sarkozy.

“If fuel was on the list, which isn’t at all certain, then
China would be compensated by oil-producing countries for any
shortfall in Iranian supplies.”

CURRENCY OVERHAUL?

Sarkozy also plans to use the opportunity to explain his
proposal for diversifying the global monetary system to reflect
a more complex world — an idea he wants to make a major subject
of the G8 and G20 summits hosted by France next year.

China has shown interest in an overhaul, challenging the
dollar’s status as the world’s favoured currency.

“We are not going to address the question in terms of
specific currencies — the yuan relative to the dollar or the
euro — but in a broader way,” said a presidential adviser.

“It’s about discussing whether in the 21st century, we might
think about the outlines of an international monetary system
that’s more in line with today’s global economic situation.”

French officials said the yuan, for example, was gaining
more and more clout as a currency.

While France hopes to benefit from the rise of China both in
politics and business, the fact that Chinese manufacturers are
now increasingly developing and selling their own technology has
made the market tougher for French planes and power plants.

In past visits, Sarkozy struck deals for two nuclear
reactors for a plant in Taishan, as well as 160 orders for
Airbus planes. No major deals are expected this time.

“One of the big questions of this trip is to find out
whether France can resume its big-contract diplomacy,” said
Francois Godement, a China specialist at the Institute of
Political Science in Paris.

“Little by little, France’s big businesses are hunted out of
their niches in China,” he said. “How many trains are we going
to sell to China, when it is selling its own high-speed train as
far afield as California and Saudi Arabia?”
(Additional reporting by Emmanuel Jarry; editing by Myra
MacDonald)

A day before the opening on Saturday, however, Pal Sarkozy and his German creative partner, Werner Hornung, appeared to be tiring of the presidential connection and resulting media storm.

“Oh no, not again the one with Carla, let’s take another one,” Pal Sarkozy told photographers looking at the portrait of Bruni-Sarkozy perched on a piano and playing the guitar to a backdrop of angel wings and rays of light — a gift for the presidential couple’s wedding in 2008.

A red rose placed on the piano is meant to symbolize love as well as Bruni-Sarkozy’s political views, which are more to the left than her husband’s.

After posing with the digital, computer-generated portraits of Bruni-Sarkozy and the president for glossy magazines around the world, the artists have decided to stop showing those works.

“I’m fed up, I can’t take it anymore,” Hornung told Reuters. “We’re not going to show them next time. They aren’t our masterpieces — we have 70 paintings and everyone only talks about these two.”

Pal Sarkozy, a dashing charmer who bears a striking resemblance to the president but is much taller, has been drawing since his youth. Some of his sketches from the 1940s were included in the exhibition, which is just a stones’ throw from the presidential Elysee palace.

He first met Hornung when they both worked in advertising, and much of their work is a critique of that world, complete with punny titles.

“Democrazy”, meant as an attack on the media, shows a tangle of cables and a bullet-ridden, exploding TV set.

“Happy Dolores” features a bare-bottomed woman in stockings, her one wooden leg sprouting a white flower.

Like his son, whose private life regularly makes headlines, Sarkozy senior is not exactly known for being media shy.

Earlier this year, he published an autobiography in which he talked about his experience as an immigrant from Hungary and his many love affairs, including his marriage with the president’s mother, which ended in divorce.

“He prefers it when I paint rather than write,” Pal Sarkozy said of his son’s reaction to his creative endeavors.

(Additional reporting by Noemie Olive; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Junior family minister Nadine Morano said visitors would have to “respect the law” and uncover their faces, prompting critics to speculate whether Saudi luxury shoppers would be forced to unveil themselves on the glitzy Champs-Elysees.

“When you arrive in a country you have to respect the laws of that country,” Morano said on France Info radio. “If I go to certain countries I’m also forced to respect the law.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday backed a strict public ban of the veil, commonly referred to in France as the burqa, eschewing more moderate proposals that focused on limits in state institutions such as schools and town halls.

The draft bill will be presented to the cabinet next month.

“Why should we accept (the veil) on the bus and not in the town hall?” Morano said. She repeated Sarkozy’s line that the veil hurts the dignity of women and equality between the sexes.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Wednesday he was ready to take on a “legal risk” by supporting the ban, which could be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that it violates freedom of religion.

France’s highest court has already warned the government that a complete ban could be unlawful.

STRIPPING ON THE CHAMPS-ELYSEES?

If the European Court or domestic courts strike it down, Sarkozy would suffer his second constitutional defeat in the space of a few months — late last year, his plan for a carbon tax was rejected because its many loopholes violated the principle of equality.

The French State Ombudsman, Jean-Paul Delevoye, worried that the law could result in difficult situations.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do with the Saudi women who go shopping on the Champs-Elysees,” he said on French radio.

The opposition Socialists have repeatedly spoken out against full veils, but are doubtful about the effectiveness of the ban.

“I can’t imagine policemen running through the streets to pull the veils off women,” Socialist parliamentarian Jean-Christophe Cambadelis said on i-Tele television.

The government says women who wear all-covering veils, such as the Afghan burqa or the niqab, would not be forced to take them off on the spot but would be asked for their name and address, and be sent a warning and a fine.

An estimated 2,000 women in France wear such veils. Since the idea of a ban was first floated last year, many women have publicly said that they want to cover up and are not forced into the practice by their husbands or families.

However, some feminists from France’s poor, multi-ethnic suburbs say there is increasing pressure on young women to veil themselves, and that a ban could help strengthen their position.

(Additional reporting by Clement Guillou)

President Nicolas Sarkozy delivers speech on security issues in Bobigny, near Paris, April 20, 2010/Benoit Tessier

France is moving toward a ban on wearing face-covering Islamic veils in public, with the government set to examine a draft bill next month amid heated debate over women’s rights and religious freedom.  Most French voters back a ban, polls have shown, but legal experts have warned that it could violate the constitution.

President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke out in favor for a complete ban on Wednesday, and the relevant bill will be presented to the cabinet in May, government spokesman Luc Chatel said on Wednesday. Sarkozy believed that the full veil, commonly referred to as the burqa in France, “hurts the dignity of women and is not acceptable in French society,” he told reporters.

The proposal has attracted both fierce criticism and praise in the home of the largest Muslim community in the 27-member European Union. Almost 10 percent of France’s 62 million population is Muslim. Chatel quoted Sarkozy as saying that everything should be done so that “no one feels stigmatised because of their faith and religious practices.”

Do you think it’s possible to introduce a ban on full veils without anyone feeling stigmatised by it?

Read the full story here.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld  

French media mostly stayed quiet when the rumor of problems in Sarkozy’s third marriage surfaced on the Internet last month.

But the presidential office’s mishandling of it has become the talk of the town, at a time when his approval ratings are at all-time lows and public debt forecasts at record highs.

Initially dismissive of the story, presidential aides fanned the flames this week by suggesting Sarkozy was the victim of a “plot” to destabilize him. A police investigation was launched into the rumor, immediately giving new legs to the story.

He now faces discontent from hard-pressed members of his UMP party fed up with using air time to defend the presidential couple instead of explaining reforms, including a politically sensitive overhaul of the costly pension system.

“The UMP members of parliament are annoyed, they really didn’t need this right now,” Jean-Francois Cope, the party’s parliamentary leader, was quoted as saying by newspaper Le Monde. “They are exasperated by this latest outpouring.”

The hooplah comes two weeks after the center-right UMP suffered a drubbing in regional elections from voters concerned about issues ranging from crime and security to jobs and a bloated budget deficit that threatens cuts in public services.

Sarkozy has barely commented, but his wife, model-turned-singer Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, tried to calm the waves by dismissing the whole story, which she said had reached “ridiculous proportions.”

“These rumors are insignificant for us,” she told Europe 1 radio Wednesday. “I do not consider that we are the victims of any plot.”

GOSSIP AND SPIES

Celine Bracq, deputy director at the BVA polling institute, said Bruni-Sarkozy’s strategy of downplaying the story was good, but should have been adopted right from the beginning.

“Hers is the right reaction, saying ‘the president is busy with important questions, with crucial issues for France, we’re in a period of economic crisis’,” Bracq said.

“But it’s a bit late… launching an investigation for something like that, which means spending money, spending time, that can only have a negative effect on public opinion.”

The highbrow Le Monde made bungling at the presidential palace its top story Thursday with the headline: “Cacophony at the Elysee, between rumors and denials.”

Police at one point even brought in the intelligence services, Bernard Squarcini, head of the DCRI domestic intelligence service told news website Mediapart.

He said his service had been asked by the chief of police in March to “find out whether the rumors about the presidential couple were part of an attempt at political destabilization.”

Whatever the origin of the rumor, the fallout has revived an old portrayal of Sarkozy as a “bling-bling” president with a monarchical style, who is obsessed with his image rather than the country’s problems.

Using police and spies to track down Web-based tittle-tattle was widely seen as heavy-handed and petty.

Former Justice Minister Rachida Dati, once a Sarkozy protege who has fallen from favor, denied media reports linking her to the rumors. Sarkozy’s chief-of-staff was quoted as saying she was unwelcome at the presidential palace.

But Bruni-Sarkozy brushed off any talk of animosity and said they were still friends.

“Conspiracy theories will lead to nothing,” wrote weekly magazine Le Point. “Why not simply laugh off this silliness?”

Voters would prefer the president to focus on bigger issues.

In a poll published in newspaper La Tribune Thursday, 70 percent said they did not believe Sarkozy would improve the public deficit during his mandate, which runs out in 2012.

France weathered the economic crisis better than most of its neighbors, but the government has earned little credit. Sarkozy’s approval ratings crashed below 30 percent for the first time in March. And he has not enjoyed any sympathy boost as a result of the Internet rumors.

“Nicolas Sarkozy has the image of someone powerful and very active, so playing the victim doesn’t work well,” said Bracq at pollster BVA. “In fact, it often has the opposite effect.”

(editing by Paul Taylor)