Europe’s New Burqa Ban: Déjà Vu in the Courtroom of Neutrality

[Merna Aboul-Ezz is a scholar of international law and human rights. She has worked with victims and survivors of human rights violations, advocating for their meaningful participation in transitional justice and accountability mechanisms.]

On 17 October 2025, the Portuguese parliament approved a bill proposed by the far-right Chega party banning face coverings worn for “gender or religious motives” in most public spaces. The measure, still awaiting President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s signature, would prohibit the niqāb and burqa on public roads, in services, sporting events, or demonstrations, with fines up to €4 000 for wearers and prison terms up to three years for anyone who “forces” another to wear them.

Portugal thereby joins a familiar European chorus where “neutrality”, “security”, and “women’s rights” merge into a single melody of control. The demographic reality, barely a few dozen women reportedly wear full-face veils nationwide, matters less than the symbolic reassurance the law performs: that the nation remains modern, secular, and coherent precisely by regulating the Muslim female body.

Neutrality as Faith

The bill’s coupling of religion and gender motives is striking, combining two domains of identity that have long structured European anxieties about Islam. It allows lawmakers to claim feminist legitimacy, protecting women from coercion, while criminalizing the same women should they choose to veil. The state thus installs itself as both savior and disciplinarian, deciding which forms of female modesty are emancipatory and which are oppressive. 

The gesture echoes the European Court of Human Rights’ reasoning in S.A.S. v. France, which upheld France’s face-covering ban to preserve the conditions of “living together” (vivre ensemble). The Court re-imagined freedom of religion as the freedom from seeing religion, a logic that transforms visibility itself into a civic duty. As WABE v. MH Müller Handels GmbH and earlier ECJ cases show, “neutral appearance” has become Europe’s most effective veil-removal mechanism. Neutrality no longer limits belief; it defines the legitimate form belief must take to enter public life.

Yet, as Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Joan Scott remind us, secularism is never neutral. It is a moral project that differentiates “reasonable” faith from “excessive” devotion. The unveiled face is coded as transparent and trustworthy; the veiled face as secretive or submissive. Neutrality thus operates as Europe’s theology of the uncovered, its ritual of purification through visibility. The invocation of gender equality operates as a moral shield, sanitizing the racialized politics beneath. When far-right leaders celebrate the “liberation” of Muslim women, they are not expanding rights but redrawing the boundaries of who counts as a rights-bearing subject. “Equality,” in this register, is reserved for those who resemble the imagined European woman; autonomous, visible, secular, and unveiled.

Gender at the Heart of Populist Politics

Portugal’s ban does not emerge in a vacuum. It is enabled by Chega’s rise within a wider European far-right ecosystem where migration, gender and Islam are woven into a single story of threat and protection. In that story, gender relations among immigrants and refugees are held up as proof of “non-Western backwardness”: sexual violence is explicitly linked to migrant and racialised men, who are cast as dangerous “masculine Others.” Muslim men in particular are imagined as “folk devils,” predisposed to sexual violence and radicalisation, embodying a uniquely oppressive patriarchy. Muslim women, by contrast, appear as “particular victims,” supposedly denied basic rights in their countries and communities, unlike “modern” Portuguese women. 

Within this script, women’s bodies become the symbolic border of the nation. Far-right actors present themselves as protectors of “our” women and “our” daughters from the allegedly hyper-patriarchal masculinities of migrants and Muslims, while simultaneously attacking “gender ideology,” LGBTQI+ rights, and feminist movements at home. Practices such as forced marriage, honor crimes or female genital mutilation are selectively amplified, portrayed as threats imported through multiculturalism, and mobilised to reinforce anti-immigration agendas. This is femonationalism in practice: women’s rights are mobilised not to challenge patriarchy, but to police the boundaries of belonging. 

The veil ban fits neatly into this repertoire. It marks veiled Muslim women as proof of an imported, illiberal culture, while erasing the pervasive cis-heteropatriarchy of European societies themselves. Under the guise of safeguarding European women, the law legitimises harsher border regimes, welfare chauvinism, and racialised policing of public space. In this sense, Portugal’s “neutrality” law is not an isolated excess, but a local iteration of a continental project in which migration, gender, and Islam are co-opted to secure a nostalgic, white, Christian, heteronormative vision of Europe.

The Comfort of Visibility

At the heart of these measures lies a desire not for equality but for comfort. The visibility of the veil unsettles liberal imaginaries of transparency and sameness. To legislate it away is to restore a fragile sense of public order. In S.A.S., the ECtHR worried that the veil “barriers against others” by concealing the face. But the greater barrier lies in a legal system that interprets unfamiliar visibility as a civic offense.

Portugal’s embrace of this logic suggests the spread of a distinctly European aesthetic of belonging: a politics of the face. The right to appear becomes contingent upon appearing correctly. By criminalizing concealment, the law renders Muslim women hyper-visible, as symbols of difference, even as it erases them from the public sphere.

In practice, this means Muslim women’s presence remains perpetually out of place. Portugal’s version also illustrates the asymmetry of neutrality. No article bans ski masks at carnival or scarves in cold weather or masks during COVID. What offends is not the fabric but the meaning attached to it. The law polices not clothing but conviction.

Article 9 and the Grammar of Limits

Under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, “everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” including the right to manifest religion “in worship, teaching, practice and observance.” Yet this right, “may be subject to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society” a phrase that has become the hinge on which the freedom turns. The Court’s proportionality test under Article 9(2) rests on three questions: (1) Is the limitation prescribed by law?, (2) Does it pursue a legitimate aim such as public safety, public order, or the rights of others?, (3) Is it necessary and proportionate in a democratic society?

In S.A.S., the first two questions were easily satisfied. It was the third, necessity, that transformed the Court’s reasoning. Rather than demanding empirical evidence of harm, the Court relied on France’s assertion that the face is “indispensable” to social interaction, and thus that veiling undermines “living together.” Necessity, in this reading, becomes a cultural judgment rather than a factual one. Earlier jurisprudence had taken a more cautious view. In Eweida and Others v. United Kingdom (2013), the Court required a “reasonable relationship of proportionality” between the restriction and its aim, striking down a ban on wearing a small Christian cross at work. 

The  UN Human Rights Committee, interpreting the same issue under Article 18 ICCPR, reached the opposite conclusion in Yaker v. France and Hebbadj v. France (2018). It held that “living together” is too abstract to constitute a legitimate aim and that the French law violated both freedom of religion and the right to non-discrimination. The Committee explicitly characterised the ban as a form of intersectional discrimination; one that simultaneously penalised gender and faith.

What this reveals is not simply the elasticity of proportionality, but the historical design of Article 9 itself. Drafted in a post-war, Christian-secular Europe, Article 9 presupposes a division between forum internum (inner belief) and forum externum (manifestation of belief). This dualism, rooted in Christian theology, privileges inward conscience over outward practice, a structure ill-suited to faith traditions, such as Islam, in which belief and manifestation are inseparable. For many Muslim women, veiling is not an optional performance of faith but a constitutive act of devotion. A legal framework that severs inner conviction from embodied practice inevitably misrecognises such forms of religiosity as excessive, even threatening.

If Portugal’s recent case exposes anything, it is that Article 9’s grammar of limits may no longer serve Europe’s plural present. The question, then, is not whether Portugal will win or lose before Strasbourg, but whether Europe can revise the very language through which it decides what counts as religion, and who counts as a believer.

Intersectional Blind Spots

Intersectionality, widely invoked in EU equality discourse, rarely penetrates these debates. The veil is read through a singular axis, religion, detached from race, gender, migration, or class. Yet in Portugal, where Muslim women are often migrants from North Africa or South Asia, the ban will disproportionately affect racialised minorities already facing structural discrimination. The state’s rhetoric of protection cannot conceal that reality. To fine a woman for her clothing while proclaiming her emancipation is to reenact colonial paternalism under feminist colours.

The Portuguese ban demonstrates that Europe’s struggle over the veil is less about fabric than about fear: fear of opacity, of plurality, of the limits of liberal universality. Each new law claims to defend coexistence, yet together they constrict it. The paradox is enduring: to safeguard “living together,” states must first decide who may appear in public, and how.

A decade after S.A.S., Europe remains trapped in the courtroom of neutrality, where equality is measured by sameness, and freedom by visibility. Whether Portugal’s Constitutional Court intervenes or not, the question persists: What kind of community demands exposure as the price of belonging?

Perhaps the question Europe must now ask is not whether women may cover their faces, but why it fears faces that do not mirror its own. Until that question is confronted, the politics of the veil will continue to replay, each time, a little more familiar.