At a United Nations summit where Ukraine occupied a significant place in the debates, the secretary general of the institution, Antonio Guterres, said a word about… the abaya. In a speech evoking in turn the war between Russia and Ukraine but also the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Portuguese wanted to discuss equality between women and men. Taking as an example certain countries governed by the rules of political Islam but also… France.
“Women still expect equal opportunities and wages, equality before the law, full valuation of their work and consideration of their opinions. Across the world, women’s rights, including sexual and reproductive rights, are being reduced or even eliminated, and their freedoms are restricted. In some countries, women and girls are punished for wearing too many clothes. In others, because they don’t wear enough,” he says.
Coming from the ranks of the Portuguese Socialist Party, Ban Ki-moon’s successor deployed a speech echoing part of the French left. Thus former presidential election candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon denounced “a new absurd, entirely artificial war of religion over women’s clothing.” The president of the environmental group in the National Assembly, Cyrielle Chatelain, for her part regretted “a logic of exclusion and stigmatization”.
Abroad, this ban has caused strong emotion in certain Muslim countries, such as Turkey. The daily Yeni Safak thus described France as an “Islamophobic fortress”. Turkiye, for his part, described this ban on the abaya as a “fascist” measure.