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Veils in court

Veils in court

Categories: Latest News

Tuesday December 16 2014

The London Evening Standard front page on Friday covered comments by the UK’s most senior female judge and deputy president of the Supreme Court, Baroness Hale, in which she is said to have shown support for ‘Forc[ing] women to take off veils in court’.

The ES front page quotes Baroness Hale as calling for “tougher” new rules following the case of Rebekah Dawson at Blackfriars Crown Court last year. Dawson’s decision not to remove her veil and the accommodation of presiding judge, who allowed her to stand trial wearing the veil but not give evidence unless she removed it, sparked a flurry of media coverage and commentary last September.

The ES front page quotes Baroness Hale as saying that it was “important” and “necessary” for faces to be seen during court proceedings.

Despite the headline ‘Force women to take off veils in court’ being the cover story and the basis of the lead editorial in Friday’s paper, nowhere in the two page interview with Baroness Hale published in the paper is there contextualisation of her remarks by publishing them in full. The most the ES give you are quotes from what is clearly a wider body of content.

It is in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph that Baroness Hale’s comments are reported more fully. The Daily Mail states that the Baroness said, “We should devise ways of making it possible and insisting people show their full face when it is necessary. There must come a point where we can insist.”

And recounting her experience in a family case, the Baroness explained why visibility was important, “In that particular case it really was very obvious both that she loved her children fantastically and that there were occasions when she was lying.

“I don’t think it would have been as obvious if I had only been able to see her eyes.

“There are other situations, not only giving evidence, when it is necessary to be able to recognise people and identify people. If it is necessary to see their face, then ways have got to be found to allow that to happen.”

The Daily Telegraph adds further remarks made by Baroness Hale, ““We don’t object to allowing people to do things for sincerely held religious reasons if they don’t do any harm. If it does harm, we have to be a bit tougher.”

It is unusual that the subject of the Evening Standard’s front page cover story and an editorial, not counting the two page feature, should omit the very sentences that appeared to give the story its prominence on the front page. It is surely necessary to give readers the opportunity to appraise the Baroness’s comments at their fullest and in context?

Moreover, the ES fails to draw out the significance of the comments emerging from Baroness Hale given news coverage earlier this year of her calls for the “reasonable accommodation” of religious beliefs.

In her presentation at the annual human rights lecture for the Law Society of Ireland, Baroness Hale reflected on a case involving an apparent conflict between religious rights and non-discrimination in the delivery of goods or services.

Speaking about the case and about conflicts arising between the equality strands, Baroness Hale pointed to the challenges faced by the courts:

“So the moral of all this is that if the law is going to protect freedom of religion and belief it has to accept that all religions and beliefs and none are equal. It cannot realistically inquire into the validity or importance of those beliefs, or any particular manifestation of them, as long as they are genuinely held. It then has to work out how far it should go in making special provisions or exceptions for particular beliefs, how far it should require the providers of employments, goods and services   accommodate them, and how far it should allow for a “conscience clause”, either to the providers, as argued by the hotel keepers in Bull v Hall, or to employees, as suggested by the dissenting minority in Ladele. I am not sure that our law has yet found a reasonable accommodation of all these different strands. The story has just begun.”

It is a shame that the newspapers could find no way of contextualising the comments by Baroness Hale in a way that allowed for some consideration of the complexities of allowing for the reasonable accommodation of religion and belief in public life.

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