First women fined under France's Burka ban

Well, I've been wondering when it would happen, and here it is:
First women fined under France's Burka ban | RFI:

A French court on Thursday imposed fines on two women for wearing the full Islamic face-covering veil, for the first time since a law was passed making it illegal to wear it in public.

You may remember that the enforcement of the law mostly depends on other citizens making a complaint given that often police would not be around to observe it. I wonder whether, as well, some of the other people who said they would try to get arrested for fulfilling the law's strictures without a niqab. When will those cases come to court.

One of the things I pointed out in earlier comments is that this arguably flouts the EDHR, and so it is no surprise to read that this will be tested:
"Yann Gré, who is the lawyer for the two women, declared that they will appeal against the ruling and are ready to take the case before the European Court of Human Rights."
Of course, this is a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut situation. It is estimated that about 2000 women in France wore niqab before the law. This may now have halved. I'm no fan of niqab, but I don't think that bearing down on people's beliefs like this is a terrible afront to freedom of conscience. Which is the point of the EDHR's protecting of life-stance beliefs. Far from creating a neutrality, the French form of secularism creates a public sphere in the image of humanistic rationalism. It is itself a belief-system and it, ironically, persecutes other belief systems whose actors cannot enter the public realm shorn of their life-shaping commitments.