Well, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph and a Civitas press release, it does. Alveena Malik, one of the contributors to a new report from the right-wing think-tank entitled Women, Islam and Western Liberalism, is quoted as writing that “the wearing of religious symbols, including the full veil, should be a fundamental human right of an individual in both the public and private sphere”.

Which is not at all the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from Civitas, who have been the source of a series of scaremongering publications directed against the Muslim community.

Indeed it’s not so long since the Civitas blog carried a piece that quoted al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri as saying that every veil-wearing Muslim woman in the west was “a soldier in the battle of Islam against Zionist-Crusader”, went on to assert that the niqab represented a serious security threat and concluded that “there are enough genuine concerns as to who and what may really lie behind the veil to justify its proscription in public places”.