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Comment by sevenless | Hacker News Reader

A reason that some European countries use in recent laws that ban women from wearing full-face burkas/niqabs, is it stops the wearers interacting/communicating with others.

The same logic implies we should ban public wear of headphones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering

"The key argument supporting this proposal is that face-coverings ... [are] a social hindrance within a society which relies on facial recognition and expression in communication. ... the European Court of Human Rights upheld the French law on 1 July 2014, accepting the argument of the French government that the law was based on "a certain idea of living together.""

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In Belgium the only reason full-face burkas and niqabs are outlawed is because you need to be recognisable. There isn't a burka prohibition but rather one against clothes/masks/... in general that can make it difficult to identify somebody.

The only exception is when it's carnival ergo the reason why it's called the carnival law here. And I assume that is also the case in most European countries.

When you are wearing a headphone you can be still identified.

I assume that sunglasses and beards are not banned.

Sunglasses and beards do not obscure your entire face to the point where you are unrecognizable whereas a burka obscures all but your eyes. Surely you can see the difference?

A beard, large sunglasses, and a hoodie can obscure all but your nose. Do you really believe a burka is that much different where one should be legal and one should not?

If you don't think that the situation is more complex than wearing a hoodie and sunglasses, then I don't believe that answering your question would have any positive outcome.

Having said that. If I were to see someone walking around with a beard, large sunglasses, and a hoodie in a possible effort to conceal their identity, I would look at them a little more careful than I would the people around them.

Clearly it's a scale, though. Do you think a man with a full, long beard wearing large sunglasses is just as recognisable as one without?

I agree with you that it (like everything else) shouldn't be a black and white issue.

I should have stated my original response a little more clearly. I don't think someone with 40-70% of their face covered is as recognizable as someone with 0% of their face covered.

>as it stops the wearers interacting with others

Are you sure that's the reason? I'd imagine it would have something to do with the laws (at least here in Denmark) around it being illegal to be fully masked.

You got it reversed, this is the justification that has been put forward for the law to come into existence in France.

The basic idea is that non-verbal face-to-face communication is culturally expected as a very basic and fundamental part of our social interactions, however inconsequential they seem. An example: bump into someone on the bus, and you'll instantly look at their face to know if they're hurt or annoyed or sorry or vindictive without a word, and can proceed on with appropriate verbal communication. In other cultures maybe arm language suffices but in a European one it creates unease at best not to see the other's full face.

This is basically why even ill people don't wear masks around here (when it would really help not spreading diseases like flu) which is, I hear, basically a given in Asian cultures.

The French government decided to make a statement about it and declared that masking your face is illegal (barring a couple exceptions including medical reasons, safety, and cultural†† events) for cultural and security† reasons.

† Obviously terrorists vet in favor of RFC3514 and choose to wear masks in public and so everyone is now safer what you didn't think of the children did you?

†† Otherwise that would make for an interesting conundrum

We have all sorts of regulations about public spaces (including the inability to hang around naked). Public spaces are not "do whatever" spaces. Headphones however do not hinder identity to the point of making communication impossible. I suppose people hanging around with VR goggles will.

Also, you omitted the primary reason:

"face-coverings prevent the clear identification of a person"

Why do you think that's the primary reason? Allowing communication is a reason that was put forward, and the ECHR's quote implies it's the reason they accepted the ban.

Anyway, as I said to someone else, sunglasses and beards are not banned. It's also questionable whether the government has any reasonable right to demand that you are clearly identifiable in public. Should everyone wear license plates?

Identifying someone is not necessary in order to talk to them; you can talk to strangers, can't you?

Because identifying someone is a prerequisite for "communication".

> It's also questionable whether the government has any reasonable right to demand that you are clearly identifiable in public

If the police is looking for you, it makes sense that they would discourage concealment en masse.

The police can already ask any individual to produce their identification. What they are wearing doesn't matter. If the person is wearing a niqab, a female officer can privately verify her face matches her ID photograph.

It seems to me that the demand for 'public recognizability' is really a demand for effective mass surveillance. It's not about being able to verify identity, it's about being able to monitor and track large numbers of people via camera and facial recognition.

It makes sense that the police would want this, as they want their jobs to be easier. But the police should not get to dictate the law.

> is really a demand for effective mass surveillance

Yes, like it or not communities require trust. States are communities. There will always be a level of mass surveillance.

The bans on Masks etc in europe goes back a long way to public order issues that the use of Masks during carnival led to.

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