A law was passed on 2011 April 11 with strong support from political parties, as well as from Sarkozy, which made it illegal to hide the face in public spaces, affecting a few thousand women in France wearing the niqab and the burqa. Scholar Olivier Roy has argued that the burkini bans and secularist policies of France provoked religious violence in France, to which Gilles Kepel responded that Britain, which has no such policies, still suffered a greater number of attacks in 2017 than France.