Bronik Matwijkiw

  In May of 2018, the strategy of law-making was utilized in the Kingdom of Denmark to respond to or, more to the point, respond against full-face garments along the lines of a democratic and secular society in which values like transparency inform and guide interaction, dialogue, and communication. The new legal norm and measure, law L 219, does not refer expressly to the veil, nor to women, or to Islam. Nevertheless, the national Parliament in the Kingdom of Denmark proceeded on the basis of premises that reveal, upon scrutiny, why the particular provision that prohibits full-face veils is widely known and referred to as the “burqa ban”.Like the niqab, the burqa is a full-face veil. Numerically speaking, between 50 and 200 Muslim women wear such a veil, a fact that enters them into a minority within a minority statistics of 0.1 or 0.2 percent. However, to trivialize the burqa ban would be an error. This point applies to all sides, including the stakeholders who assumed the responsibility of drafting the new norm and measure. As the Danish legislators see things, law 219 is not an instance of “shooting sparrows with a cannon”. After this, the need to legislate appears to be an instance of following a trend in Europe and, at the same time, sending a message about the prevailing (Danish) ideology in contradistinction to “political Islam” that gives rise to unwanted phenomena like gender inequality, religious extremism, and terrorism. The authors of The 2018 Danish “Burqa Ban”: Joining a European Trend and Sending a National Messageattempt to give an in-depth account of the burqa ban and the political context for this, as provided by the negotiations that led up to the ban’s final adoption. One objective is to identify the various variables in the legal equation and, as another objective, capture the wider prescriptively-proscriptive direction of the Danish case, thereby also establishing a platform for further discussion, reflection, and response. (This part of the project – an intended component and outcome since the formulation of the original research task, labor division, and methodology – is published in the concurrent but separate article, The Burqa Ban: Legal Precursors for Denmark, American Experiences and Experiments, and Philosophical and Critical Examinations.)

As the title of the article suggests, “The Burqa Ban”: Legal Precursors for Denmark, American Experiences and Experiments, and Philosophical and Critical Examinations, the authors embark on a factually investigative as well as a reflective response. More precisely, they use The 2018 Danish “Burqa Ban”: Joining a European Trend and Sending a National Message (published as a concurrent but separate article in this issue of <span>International Studies Journal</span>) as a platform for further analysis and discussion of different perspectives. These include case-law at the international level while focusing attention on recent rulings and judicial reasoning by the ECtHR and the ECJ; critical thought-experiments in religion, morality, human rights, and the democratic public space; a contextualized account of burqa-wearing interventions by federal and state governments and, moreover, various courts in the United States; and philosophical commentary and, in some instances, criticism of the Danish and/or European (French, etc.) approach. The different contributions have different aims. The section on case-law at the international level reports on those central judgments that, in effect, helped to pave the path for the Kingdom of Denmark’s burqa ban. Concerning the concurring judges at the ECtHR, the opinions served to uphold a preexisting ban and to grant a <span>wide margin of appreciation to the national authorities, thereby limiting the Court’s own review. </span> <span>As regards</span><span>to the ECJ, the legality of company rules that contain a policy of neutrality for the workplace was examined, with a similar outcome. The authors who discuss </span>religion, morality, human rights and the democratic public space are endeavoring to, respectively, appeal to ethics as a testing stone for law and to both challenge and address several forms of “expressivist worry” in connection with face veils. In doing so, the authors ask a number of thought-provoking questions that hopefully will inspire public policymakers to careful analysis. While the section that is devoted to American perspectives highlights a comprehensive survey of political and legal responses to, in particular, full-face veils like the burqa</em>, the relevant author also incorporates public perceptions and, in the course of examining these, draws a parallel to “the fate” of the hoodie. The constitutionality of burqa</em>-wearing in America, so it also appears, is partially an open question, but differentiating between religious, political, or personal reasons is a de jure</em> premise. Given that the Danish legislators who drafted law L 219 to ban burqa</em>-wearing in public places rely on a reference to political Islam, they relegate religious and personal reasons to the private domain, thereby also adopting secularism as a premise. This is explored in the last author response of the article, more precisely, in an account of the underlying materialism that, in turn, is applied to Muslim women. If policymakers and legislators engaged in Thinking Things Through exercises, they could, as a minimum, avoid law-making strategies that are not in the spirit of the theory they themselves invoke, albeit tacitly. While the aim of, as it were, arresting culturally self-contradicting legislators is unique for the section in question, all the authors who contribute to the joint research project have one end-goal in common, namely to inform about important perspectives while at the same time</em> opening up for parameters for (more) fruitful, constructive and (if need be) critical debate in the future. With this in mind, four recommendations are presented by the research director for the project. Legally, politically, socially and culturally, conflict-resolution should not translate the relationship between rulers and the ruled into a separation ideology, an instance of controllers versus</em> the controlled. All things being equal, that is the objective limit for a democratic society.

  Extreme measures to reduce the number and cost of refugees and immigrants belong among the recent examples of the Kingdom of Denmark’s illiberal responses to crises in the wake of third party armed conflict. Politically, the process of tightening the law and having a transparently unwelcoming attitude towards foreigners began in 2001, at least according to some experts on Danish foreign policy, e.g. Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen. While the causes are controversial, the effects are clear. Denmark is undercutting its own history. However popular the current VLAK-coalition government’s Minister of Immigration, Integration and Housingmay be among the Danes, the ongoing series of restrictive policies cannot but result in Red Flags. Irrespective of any motivationally deeper or underlying reasons for their adoption, the relevant legal and other measures constitute international relations events and changes; and, as such, they affect the order among states. In terms of regional and global politics, the question is whether there is an analogy between post-2013 Qatar and post-2001 Denmark? More precisely, the question is whether Denmark should be listed under past as opposed to present “small and influential states”? By using Mehran Kamrava’s work on Qatar as a platform for a role reversal claim, the authors present a muted subtle power argument for the need to downgrade Denmark, too. Furthermore, a tension between the official Danish image and the climate of cultural values in Denmark creates a complex us versus them disconnect which, in turn, makes it possible to provide or, more to the point, explain some aspects of the evidence for the state’s precarious human rights capacity. Part of the argument derives from pre-2001 literary whistleblowing concerning Danishness – a strategy that accords with the popular Danish Minister’s own use of satire as a truth-recognition methodology. 

In a previous article, Stakeholder Theory and the Logic of Value Concepts: Challenges for Contemporary International Law, published in International Studies Journal (ISJ) in2011, the authors outlined the general premises for stakeholder theory applications and international human rights law. However, the challenges that pertain to economic/social rights were not addressed in detail. In this article, therefore, the authors provide a comparative analysis of narrow (or classical) versus broad (or modern)stakeholder theory with a specific view to determining the status of basic economic/social rights in the context of international human rights law. Narrow stakeholder theory is illustrated by Milton Friedman’s framework, whereas the main ideasand thoughts that define the broad alternative are derived from the work of R. Edward Freeman. While the authors primarily endeavor to outlinethe single most crucial premises and implications of application, they are also hoping to inspire discussion about future developments, especially since it could be argued that the stakeholder theory that has the best fit with United Nations norms and strategies may be conducive to a business as usual conclusion.