Barcelona has become the first major city in Spain to forbid face veils in municipal buildings, including public markets, schools, hospitals and libraries. The ban will come into effect later this year. Two other municipalities in the north-eastern Catalonia region, Lleida and El Vendrell, have...
Lord Patten of Barnes reflects in the Guardian’s Comment is free section on the need for the EU to show ‘real courage’ in the Middle East, otherwise it risks being complicit in illegal acts. Calling for a new set of initiatives to diffuse tensions in the Middle East, Lord...
Roger Godsiff MP for Birmingham Hall Green has condemned the use of surveillance cameras in Muslim communities in Birmingham as ‘a grave infringement of civil liberties’, and has tabled an Early Day Motion in parliament calling on the government to intervene to ensure that the...
John Crace’s Guardian column summarises Melanie Phillips’ new book, World Turned Upside Down, providing an amusing insight into the worldview that insists ‘black is white.’ Satirising Melanie’s logic, Crace writes: ‘This book arose from a sense of perplexity...
The BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, has criticised the BBC Trust for finding him ‘guilty’ of inaccuracies in two reports he wrote on Israel last year. Speaking to an audience at the University of Westminster, where he was presented with the Charles Wheeler award in...
The Council of Europe has welcomed the UK government’s decision to hold an inquiry into torture and rendition, as the ‘proper response’ that other countries ought to emulate. From the Guardian: ‘The council’s commissioner for human rights, Thomas Hammarberg, said...
The European Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) has published its annual report for the year 2009 in which it has identified enforcement gaps in data protection, racism, discrimination and workers rights. The report found that during ‘the period 2000-2008, 10 of the 12 Member States which...
Journalist Peter Oborne, who writes for the Spectator and Daily Mail, denounced the unfair representation of Muslims in the media as ‘un-British’ at a conference on Islamophobia on Saturday. Oborne, who investigated how press coverage of terrorism has affected the portrayal of Islam...
Speaking to an audience of scholars at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS), Prince Charles yesterday urged people to preserve the environment and heal the ‘widening division’ between humanity and Nature. Seventeen years after his landmark speech entitled ‘Islam and the West’ at...
The Home Office has revealed that ‘tens of thousands’ of people across the UK have been stopped and searched illegally under the controversial section 44 of the Terrorism Act (2000) which allows police to stop and search someone without suspicion that an offence has occurred. An...
