The full veil is a barrier to communication. It is a visible statement of separation and difference. It makes better, more positive relations between individuals and communities more difficult.

That’s what I said in this paper in 2006. It’s still my view.

I defend to the last those who chose to wear the headscarf as a sign of their religious devotion.

I am wholly opposed to any ban on the full veil — including the French Government’s law by which women who wear the veil in public can be fined up to €150 (£125), and be required to attend a citizenship course.

However, for reasons unconnected with the French Government’s policy, I welcome this week’s judgement by the European Court of Human Rights that the French prohibition was not unlawful under the terms of the European Convention of Human Rights.

The Court commented there was much in the French Parliament’s argument that their ban was necessary to encourage people better to live together.

But the core of their judgement was that questions like this should be settled by each nation’s own elected representatives, and not by distant judges in Strasbourg.

“The national authorities have direct democratic legitimation and are … in principle better placed than an international court to evaluate local needs and conditions,” they said.

Which democrat could disagree with that?

Remember the Strasbourg Court’s judgement, in 2005, that the UK’s ban on prisoners being able to vote was unlawful? In 2011, the British Parliament voted by 234 to 22 to reject this judgement.

It’s never been enforced.

In the prisoner votes case, the Court went too far in trying to tell the British public and their MPs what to think. The importance of this latest decision is that, implicitly, the Court recognises this.

As for the veil – ‘No’, to a ban. ‘Yes’, to persuasion.

References in the Holy Koran about the veil are highly ambiguous. Muslim theologians have long disagreed.

It has no more direct root in the Holy Koran than the Catholic celibacy of priests has in the Bible.