Human Rights Watch (HRW) has spoken out against the decision by the State Council to expand the headscarf ban applied in state offices to the streets.
Jonathan Sugden, the Turkey representative for the New York-based committee, in a statement he made to Zaman called the decision "very worrisome".
The HRW official pointed out the decision aims at expanding the headscarf ban, adding the latest decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) might have "encouraged" Turkish officials.
"I wonder whether the State Council was encouraged by the ECHR's decision on Sahin. If it has been, this is wrong. If it is taken to ECHR, the case will be overturned as it is an unjust and discriminative intervention in how a woman may dress in the public sphere, even taking the Court's current conservative attitude into consideration," Sugden said.
The HRW official emphasized the committee is against all approaches intervening in a women's dress code.
Sugden reiterated that the HRW also opposed the compulsory veiling in Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as the ban on veiling in Turkey, Uzbekistan and France. Sugden pointed out women with headscarves cannot get a driver's license, enter museums, nor attend their children's graduation ceremonies.
"These women have already been excluded from schools, universities, public service buildings yet Parliament State officials had agreed that women were free to wear the headscarf outside the governmental sphere. This reason was an unacceptable explanation at that time as well, but it has now turned out that even this is not true," HRW's researcher for Turkey said.
Sugden said governments must stop pressuring women on what to wear, and said the energy must be spent on how secular, non-Muslim and Muslim people live together in society. The HRW had criticized ECHR's decision on Sahin as well.