On April 11, 2011, Kenza Drider, a thirty-two-year-old mother of four, broke the law in Paris: she wore the niqab in public. She had traveled by train from her home in Avignon to protest a new law banning the full-face Muslim veil in all public spaces throughout France. In June 2010 twenty-five-year-old Louiza (not her real name) was shot at close range with a paintball gun as she walked down the street in Grozny because she wasn’t wearing a headscarf. That summer many women in the Russian republic of Chechnya fell victim to attacks and harassment during a “virtue campaign” to force women to cover themselves.

What these two incidents have in common is interference—sometimes brutal, always wrong—with the fundamental human rights of women in the name of religion, tradition, or misguided protectionism. In Indonesia’s Aceh province, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan under the Taliban, as well as parts of Somalia, Gaza, and Chechnya, women are forced to cover up. At the same time, local and national governments in Europe have moved to prohibit women and girls from wearing the veil in schools and public service. In April 2011, France enacted a national law banning the wearing of full-face veils anywhere in public; Belgium is poised to adopt a similar law, and comparable nationwide bans have been proposed in a number of other European countries. Several cities in Belgium, Spain, and Italy already have local bans in place.

The sad irony is that whether they are being forced to cover up or to uncover, these women are being discriminated against. Banned from wearing the hijab—a traditional Muslim headscarf—or forced to veil themselves, women around the world are being stripped of their basic rights to personal autonomy; to freedom of expression; and to freedom of religion, thought, and conscience.

Though men are also subject to religious and traditional practices, including dress codes that impinge on their freedoms, women around the world are far more likely to see their decisions dictated, their options curtailed, even their physical integrity and lives threatened, by official and societal norms about propriety.

Women’s rights activists, both within and outside Muslim communities, have long argued that veiling, and full veiling of the face and body in particular, is a powerful symbol of the oppression and subjugation of women.