Conservatives appeal court’s niqab ruling
The federal government has carried through on its promise to appeal a court ruling that invalidated a policy forbidding women from covering their faces when being sworn in as citizens.
In a notice filed Monday with the Federal Court of Appeal, lawyers for the minister of citizenship and immigration said a federal judge committed several errors in fact and law, including “misapprehending, misconstruing or failing to consider the evidence before the court.”
The challenge against the niqab ban was originally brought forward by Zunera Ishaq, a Mississauga, Ont., mother from Pakistan who wrote in an affidavit that covering her face is “mandatory to my faith” and “integral to the modesty that a Muslim woman must show.”
In a court ruling last month, federal Judge Keith Boswell deemed the niqab ban to be unlawful because it “interferes with a citizenship judge’s duty to allow candidates for citizenship the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization or the solemn affirmation of the oath.”
That prompted Prime Minister Stephen Harper to vow to appeal the ruling because covering one’s face while being sworn in is “not how we do things here,” Clarke said.