It may not be a law as yet in Belgium, but it is the law in Italy.
Although the law says "inside public buildings, schools and hospitals" she was stopped on the street in front of a post office (this from another article) on her way to the mosque. Note the interpretation of woman wearing the veil from the husband and from the Iman.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 115756.eceThe growing European row over bans on Muslim veils today spread to Italy after a Tunisian-born woman was fined for wearing a burqa, the first time such a penalty has been imposed in the country.
Amel Marmouri, 26, was stopped by carabinieri officers in a spot check outside a post office in Novara in northern Italy and given a 500 euro (£431) fine, payable within 90 days. She at first declined to lift her veil to be identified because the officers were male, but agreed when a municipal police patrol which included a woman officer was summoned.
The fine was imposed under a city ordinance introduced in January in Novara banning any clothing which “prevents the immediate identification of the wearer inside public buildings, schools and hospitals”. It marked the first time the regulation had been enforced.
Massimo Giordano, the Mayor of Novara, said the regulation was based on a 1975 national anti terrorist law making it illegal for men or women to be in public place with their faces covered. Similar local regulations have been passed at Treviso in the Veneto, Fermignano in the Marche and Montegrotto Terme near Padua.
Ben Salah Braim, 36, the woman's husband and a building worker, said he would respect the regulation, but would have to confine his wife at home since the Koran forbade other men to see her face.
“Amel may not be looked at by other men,” he told Corriere della Sera. “Our religion is explicit on this,” he said. “If this is the law in Italy, what can I do? I don't know how I am going to find the money to pay the 500 Euro fine.”
He said he had been aware of the local ban on burqas, and accepted that it was a general ban and “not against my religion”.
He said the incident had occurred last Friday in the suburb of Sant' Agabio, which has a high immigrant population, when he and his wife were on their way to the local mosque to pray. “I thought that at least on Fridays the burqa might be allowed.”
However, Izzedin Elzir, an imam in Florence and head of the Islamic Community and Organisations Union in Italy, said it was a “matter of interpretation” whether the Koran forbade women to show their faces in public. 'We are for the freedom of women and against veils of any kind,” he said, adding “Italian laws must be respected.” Mr Giordano is a member of the anti-immigration Northern League Party, which has campaigned against the building of mosques in northern Italy. He said he had issued the new regulation “for reasons of security, but also so that people who came to live in our city respect our traditions and customs”.
He added: "The regulations in Novara specifically cover people wearing clothing that prevents them from being identified in a public place, and a post office is a public place. The same would also apply to a motorcyclist who walked into a post office wearing a crash helmet. The people of Novara do not want to see people walking around in the city wearing a burqa.”
Mr Giordano said the ordinance was “the only tool at our disposal to stop behaviour that makes the already difficult process of integration even harder. Unfortunately it is apparently not yet clear to everyone that clothes preventing the wearer's identification can be tolerated at home but not in public places, in schools, on buses or in post offices”.
Paolo Cortese, the chief of police in Novara, also said the fine had been handed out because a post office was “a public building.' However Nicolo Zanon, a constitutional lawyer, said the legality of the “excessive” Novara regulation was “debatable” since it affected “individual rights and religious sentiment”.
Asked if his new ordinance would prove counterproductive if husbands closeted their wives at home, Mr Giordano said “husbands must take into account that in Italy men and women are equal and freedom is a fundamental right. If people do not respect our values, why do they come to live here?”
He said he was “not a racist. The racists are those who force their wives to dress like this.”.
Isabella Bossi Fedrigotti, a novelist and social commentator, said any husband who forced his wife to stay at home would pay the price by having to “take the children to school or the doctor, do the shopping, pay the bills and go to the bank or post office”.
The Northern League, an increasingly powerful ally in Silvio Berlusconi's ruling centre Right coalition, has tabled a Parliamentary amendment to the 1975 anti terror law altering the wording specifically to prohibit "the use of female garments common among women of Islamic faith known as burqas and niqabs".
There are an estimated 1,200,000 Muslims in Italy, or 1.5 per cent of the population, with most coming from Morocco, Albania, Tunisia, Egypt and Senegal.
Last Friday Belgium's lower house voted unanimously to prohibit women from wearing full face veils in public. If the bill is passed by the Belgian Senate it will become Europe's first national 'burqa ban'.
The French Government of President Nicolas Sarkozy is also drafting a bill that would make it illegal to wear the burqa.