Following a March Senate vote with the same result, the house decided by 93 votes to 87 that the initiative would not go through.
Speaking for the majority, centre-right Radical Party parliamentarian Hugues Hiltpold said banning the burka would be excessive and would encourage tourists from Muslim countries to have negative opinions of the country.
“Today in Switzerland, wearing this type of clothing for religious reasons doesn’t pose any problems in daily life and is a rare practice in the Swiss Muslim community,” Hiltpold added.
“Banning the niqab or the burka in Switzerland would have adverse consequences for Swiss Muslims.” » | swissinfo.ch and agencies | Friday, September 28, 2012
MUSLIMS IN SWITZERLAND: The Muslim community in Switzerland accounts for about 4.5 per cent of the population.
Most Muslim immigrants came from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey. The community includes up to 100 nationalities.
The number of Muslims doubled between the censuses of 1990 and 2000, largely boosted by an influx of refugees and asylum seekers, including from the war in the former Yugoslavia.
There are about 200 mosques and prayer houses in Switzerland, but only four have a minaret. On November 29, 2009, 57 per cent of voters supported a people’s initiative to ban the construction of new minarets in Switzerland. This was in the wake of heated debates and legal battles at a local level about requests by mosques to build more minarets. [Source: swissinfo.ch]
