The Mayor has welcomed government plans to extend the laws against religious discrimination and the incitement to religious hatred. At present Jewish and Sikh communities are protected under the Race Relations Act as ‘ethnic groups’. Muslims and Hindus receive no such protection. The new legislation would give the same protection to all religious communities. The moves to ban incitement to religious hatred are contained in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill, currently before parliament. They will be reinforced by measures in the Equality Bill to make it illegal to deny goods and services on religious grounds. The law should help to prevent situations like those in France where Muslim girls have been denied the right to wear their headscarves to school and Sikh boys their turbans. The protection of religious minorities is now a priority for the Commission for Racial Equality. Chair Trevor Phillips said: ‘Prejudice is increasingly and overtly not about race, but about culture and faith. The gaping hole in legislation has affected British Muslims in particular. The rise in complaints over the past year or so has revealed their lack of legislative protection.’ Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and other religious leaders have all come out in broad support of the government’s proposals. The Church of England has voiced support in principle but is waiting to see the detail. Muhammad Abdul Bari, Deputy Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, welcomed the move saying: ‘Religious discrimination should be unlawful in the same way that race discrimination is unlawful.’ The new incitement law would work both ways he added – it would not just protect Muslims but the Muslim community would also be subject to it: ‘Everybody would have to be careful of what they did, said and wrote that could incite religious hatred.’ However, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said the law as it stands is pretty ineffectual. The Board’s Director General, Neville Nagler, said: There are so many conditions that have to be fulfilled before any prosecution can be brought that it makes it very difficult to actually prove incitement.’ Dabinderjit Singh of the Sikh Secretariat, took a similar view. ‘At the moment the law against incitement is hardly ever successful. So what would be the point of extending it to include other religions without totally rewriting it first?’ he said. The government points out that the new measures are not intended to interfere with legitimate debate about religion. Offensive words and actions must be threatening, abusive or insulting and must either be intended or likely to stir up hatred. Hatred is a strong term going beyond simply causing offence or hostility. In France three Sikh boys have been expelled from school for wearing their turbans. Jasvir Singh, 15, Ranjit Singh, 17, and Bikramjit Singh, 18, who are not related, were expelled when school authorities decided the under-turban, or keski, was unacceptable under the new French law banning religious symbols in schools. The boys appealed against the expulsion, but a French court has ruled that it is down to the individual school to find a compromise. France’s Sikh community has said that the wearing of the smaller underturban is a compromise, but their school, the Lycee Louise Michel in Bobigny, Paris, said that they cannot have different rules for different religions and the boys were expelled when they returned for the start of term. The law, which came into force in France last September bans the wearing of overt religious symbols in public schools. Several Muslim girls have already been expelled for wearing headscarves. The Sikh religion requires men to grow their hair long and never cut it. Most men wear a turban to contain their hair. Sikhs say that the turban is not a religious symbol, but is an article of faith and integral to their way of life and it should not be banned. http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/londoner/docs/londoner-jan05.pdf