Legislative populism is a phenomenon that accompanies the burqa ban trend. The belief that politicians (should) resort to policies and laws that restrict international human rights and constitutional freedoms in response to popular demand is an ideology in its own right. While fighting to conserve traditional values within a given nation-state, such politicians set aside logic in favor of sentiments and stances that allegedly represent the majority of the population. Only if the citizenry were asked to cast their vote solely on the basis of their support or opposition to the burqa ban, would it be possible to begin to determine the truth value of the proposition that politicians did in fact respond to popular demand.

Such a social experiment has not been done, nor is it realistic. Nevertheless, legislative populism as a manifestation of neonational(ist) thoughts and beliefs presents a challenge that we cannot escape in the future. This has to do with democracy. The legal burqa ban trend is both the outcome of the threat that Islamic full-face veils pose to liberal democracy (which therefore deserves special consideration in the arguments of those legislators who prohibit them) and a precondition for a more ideal and postinternational(ist) system. The latter exhibits the desirable kind of resilience against any deconstruction of the values that are claimed to express our authenticity – and relativistic autonomy and authority augment the audacity – as seen by critics – to allow self-regarding freedom on the one hand and withhold human rights protections and tolerance toward members of an ethnic and religious minority on the other hand.

The dual defeat is a challenge that is reinforced by the fact that non-Western Muslims belong among those vulnerable stakeholders that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) put on the list of’ organizational priorities’ for 2018-2021. Among these, the Regional Office for Europe chose to pursue a select number of specific objectives. These priorities were:

• – The erosion of democracy in Europe;

• – Equality and inclusion;

• – Migration and xenophobia;

• – Human rights integration.

Besides the recognition of the way that different branches of international law affect each other, the OHCHR Regional Office for Europe is well aware of the synergies between setbacks in democracy and setbacks that define the globalization era.