The results displayed on the parliament’s electronic board

PARIS, February 10 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – France's lower house of parliament adopted Tuesday, February 10, with an overwhelming majority a controversial bill that would ban hijab and religious insignia in state schools, despite fierce opposition from the country’s sizable minorities and international rights groups.

The text, put forward by President Jacques Chirac's ruling centre-right Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) party and supported by the left-wing opposition Socialists, was adopted by a vote of 494 to 36, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The National Assembly held its vote on the government-sponsored bill at 4:15 pm (1515 GMT) following three days of debate last week.

The draft law will pass now to the upper house of parliament, the Senate, for another vote and is expected to become law by the start of the next school year in September.

The UMP dominates both houses of parliament, making passage of the bill very easy.

The Socialist opposition wanted the text to be toughened -- replacing the word "conspicuous" religious insignia with "visible" -- but agreed to vote in favor after the UMP promised a review of the law in a year.

Chirac had come out in favor of the measure, which would make it illegal to wear clothes or insignia that "conspicuously" display religious affiliation in state schools.

According to AFP, the measure has the support of around 70 percent of the French population, and is strongly backed by teachers.

In addition to hijab, the law would apply to skull caps worn by Jewish boys, and "large" Christian crosses.

Amid fears that their turbans would fall under the law, French Sikhs planned mass demonstrations, turbans are an "indispensable religious obligation".

Unworkable

Some French lawmakers have expressed their doubts about the law, calling it unnecessary, unworkable and liable to inflame sentiment among the Muslim community, which already feels victimized by society.

"The Muslim community is going to feel stigmatized. The law will not treat the evil at its source -- that is to say the problem of integration. That is the big mistake of a law that has set off this national psychodrama over secularism," said Alain Madelin, who heads the liberal wing of the UMP.

Mohammad Al-Bishari, the head of the General Federation of France’s Muslims, told Aljazeera satellite channel that the bill will see the kicking-out of hundreds of hijab-wearing students, who will insist on putting on the hijab.

He also said it will leave Muslim families in France in an unenviable position before their hijab-wearing daughters, given that hijab is an obligation and not a religious symbol as claimed by the bill.

Last month, Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority, grand mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, said that "interfering in the affairs of Muslims regarding hijab is an infringement on the human rights that they (French) say they are defending".

The government says the bill upholds France's tradition of secularity -- a strict separation of church and state.

But the Muslim community – around six million people – and several international rights groups view the move as a blow to religious freedom.

On Monday, February 9, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, based in Austria, said it was against the French bill because it violated human rights.

"The law would contradict the conventions on human rights and violate the international standards that France has agreed and sometimes contributed to create," the head of the group, Aaron Rhodes, said.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which advises Congress, the White House and State Department, said last week it, too, believed the proposed law could breach international human rights standards.

"These restrictions, if enacted, may violate France's international commitments... under which each individual is guaranteed the freedom to manifest religion or belief, in public as well as in private," committee chairman Michael Young said in a statement.

London mayor Ken Livingstone had also written to French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin urging him to scrap the plan.