burka ban

Angela Kempeners, a 36-year-old Limburg woman who was removed from an Arriva bus in Stein on Monday because she was wearing a niqab, is shaken by the event, but will continue to take the bus to work. "I felt just like a black person in the United States. This really hit me", she said to newspaper Trouw.

A man was arrested in Den Haag Centraal on Friday for wearing a balaclava in the station. But the arrest was unjustified, the police in The Hague said on Twitter on Monday.

The arrested man was a demonstrator. He was wearing a balaclava as a counter-protest for a pro-burka protest happening on the Malieveld, according to the Telegraaf. He walked into the station, and was quickly addressed and taken away by police officers, according to the newspaper.

There seems to be some confusion around exactly what the so-called burka ban, implemented in the Netherlands on August 1st, entails. The municipality of Nijmegen had to apologize to a niqab wearing woman on Sunday, after she was stopped at the door of the Leemkuil playground in the city when she and her family wanted to visit, De Gelderlander reports.

The police want to offer an alternative for burka or niqab wearers who want to come to a police station to make a report after the ban on face-covering clothing takes effect on August 1st. A police directive states that people who do not want to take off their veil "for religious reasons" can go to a separate area, a so-called reporting area, to make their report. This alternative is against the law, the Ministry of Home Affairs said to NRC.

The Netherlands will implement its burka ban, officially called the Partial Ban On Face Covering Clothing Act, on August 1st. From that day on no face covering clothing may be worn in education, in government buildings, in healthcare and on public transit, AD reports.

Amsterday mayor Femke Halsema must enforce the ban on face-covering clothing, commonly referred to as the burka ban, in the Dutch capital, State Secretary Barbara Visser of Defense said on WNL on Sunday. "No one is above the law", Visser said. "Including the mayor of Amsterdam."

The Amsterdam city council meeting was suspended for a time on Thursday afternoon while three men dressed as blackface Zwarte Pieten, complete with gold rings in their ears and red lips, were removed from the public gallery. Officially they were removed because the blackface makeup made them unrecognizable and they thereby violated a ban on wearing face-covering clothing in public buildings, AD reports.

In its annual report Amnesty International is sounding the alarm about the rise of populism across the world and the implications it has for human rights. According to the human rights organization, the situation deteriorated significantly over 2016, and that can be attributed political forces rebelling against the established order. Also in the Netherlands populism is a rising problem, the organization said in a brief press conference about the report, NOS reports.

A controversial motion to ban burqas, veils, and other “face-covering clothing” from some Dutch public institutions was approved by a majority of parliament on Tuesday. The motion passed by a show of hands, the lower house of parliament confirmed, and will head to the senate for approval.