A man who was jailed for two years for ripping off a Muslim woman’s veil in Glasgow city centre has lost his appeal. William Baikie, 28, had claimed that the prison term he was given after admitting the assault at Glasgow Central Station was excessive.

But judges at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh ruled that a sheriff was entitled to impose the punishment he selected.

Lord Osborne, who heard the appeal with Lord Reed, said Sheriff Lindsay Wood had described the crime as “appalling and deeply intrusive”.

The senior judge said: “We are not of the view that that is an overstatement of the character of the offence.”

“We consider that it would require little imagination on the part of anyone to foresee what the likely effect would be of committing an offence of this kind, particularly in the circumstances in which we live.”   »»» STV News (Scotland)

In the time of Turtullian, a Latin father of the early Christian Church, it was in his region a custom for unmarried women to veil themselves from public view. A controversy arose when a group wanted to force young women to abandon the veil. In a treatise entitled “On the veiling of virgins”, Turtullian wrote, “Every public exposure of an honourable virgin is (for her) a suffering of rape: and yet the suffering of carnal violence is the lesser (evil), because it comes of natural office. …O sacrilegious hands, which would remove a garment dedicated to God!”

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