MOSCOW, March 5 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Russia's Supreme Court on Wednesday, March 5, upheld a ban on Muslim women wearing the traditional Islamic headscarf on identity photographs, rejecting a complaint by residents of the central republic of Tatarstan.

Supreme Court judge Nikolai Romanenkov announced the ruling but said that the plaintiffs could contest the decision at the court's appeals panel, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Ten women from Tatarstan launched a lawsuit against the interior ministry which refused to accept photographs of Muslim women wearing headscarves, the Interfax news agency said.

They told the court that under the Islamic sharia (law), a Muslim woman must wear clothes covering her entire body except for the face and hands and it is sinful for anyone apart from her husband and close relatives to see her without a headscarf.

The women said the interior ministry rules violated their rights as any police officer could ask them to remove their headscarves while checking their passports if they were bareheaded on the passport photographs.

Interior ministry officials told the court that a woman wearing a headscarf in their passport photograph would make it difficult to identify her because her ears, forehead and neck would be covered.

"The Koran is not a source of law in Russia. Our country is secular. None of the religions can play a dominant role," Irina Bochinkova from the interior ministry said.

The Muslim women's lawyer, Farid Zagidulla, told Interfax that an appeal will be lodged with the Supreme Court within the next 10 days.

"If the appeal is not granted, we will go to the European Court of Human Rights," he stressed.

The lawyer accused the court of anti-Islamic bias.

"Political motives cannot be ruled out. Some anti-Islamic sentiments may have played a part," he charged.

The Muslim women of Tatarstan have been up in arms since April last year when a local court ruled that the headscarf could not be worn on photographs in official documents.

The republic's supreme court upheld the ban.

The issue arose after three women from the Tatar village of Nizhnekamsk took legal action to oppose the local interior ministry's refusal to accept their photographs on identity documents.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last year backed the local authorities in their stance.

The headscarf is not widely worn in Tatarstan, a semi-autonomous republic whose 5.5 million inhabitants comprise around 51 percent Muslims and 43 percent ethnic Russian Orthodox.

Russia is home to around 20 million Muslims who make up around one in seven of the overall population.