A group of women wearing burqas. Photo credit: Nitin Madhav, USAID

A French parliamentary panel recommended today that the country ban face-covering Muslim veils in public spaces, including universities, hospitals, and on public transport.

In a 280-page report, the 32-member cross-party committee of MPs suggested a partial ban, but stopped short of an outright ban full veils in private buildings and on streets, reported The New York Times. The panel indicated that while lawmakers favored such a ban, they were at the moment unable to agree on one and asked that the Council of State, a body which provides the executive with legal advice, examine the legality of such legislation.

The report, culminating a six-month enquiry, recommends that people keep their faces uncovered while using public facilities, reported The Washington Post. Failure to do so would result “in a refusal to deliver the service demanded,” the report said.

Al Jazeera also noted that the report recommended that authorities refuse citizenship and residency permits to anyone who bears visible signs of “radical religious practice” and that it claimed that the burqa was a “challenge” to the French republic.

The panel was headed by Communist MP André Gerin, who has characterised the full veil as a part of the “black tide of fundamentalism.” It was established last year, after President Nicolas Sarkozy said that the burqa was not welcome in France, The Guardian reported.

An estimated 6 million Muslims live in France. According to police reports, less than 2,000 women in France wear full veils, but MPs such as Gerin, whose constituency in Lyon has many Muslim residents, insist this is a growing trend that must be prevented, reported Reuters.

It is not clear at this point what action, if any, the government will take on the report; no action is expected before the March elections, Al Jazeera reported.

While many Muslim leaders back the limits imposed on full veils, since they are not mandatory in Islam, it was France’s previous ban on Islamic headscarves that raised an outcry from the international community. Passed in 2004, the law prohibited the wearing of headscarves, including Islamic “hijabs” and Sikh turbans, in state schools caused uproar across the international Muslim and Sikh communities. According to the BBC, Saudi Arabia’s top cleric accused the proposed French law of violating the human rights it claimed to be defending, as did the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the US-based advisory group, the Commission on International Religious Freedom.