Cherie Blair has criticised Muslim religious dress for women where it fails to acknowledge "the woman's right to be a person."

The wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair warned against the full-face veil, or niqab, worn by strictly Islamic women worldwide because it could prevent a woman from expressing her personality.

Mrs Blair, a practising Roman Catholic who is to publish her own memoirs in October next year, admitted that she had herself been educated by Catholic nuns who wore veils. She said she had no problem with women covering their heads.

But on Islamic veils, she said: "I think however, that if you get to the stage where a woman is not able to express her personality because we cannot see her face, then we do have to ask whether this is something that is actually acknowledging the woman's right to be a person."

Mrs Blair did not confine her criticisms of the full veil to Islamic countries. She said: "I went to a function in Leicester and their were groups of school children, some from Islamic schools who were fully covered, your first reaction is 'how can this be?' But they had views of their own which they were perfectly capable of expressing".

She said people could get "very hung up about women's clothes" and the question was about honouring religious beliefs, "provided they are freely undertaken".

"I think we have to be careful about judging people by their appearances," she said.

Mrs Blair, a top human rights lawyer, was speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme in advance of a lecture she is delivering today on women, culture and religion. In the lecture, organised by the Today programme and Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, she will call for greater sexual equality, particularly in Islamic countries. She will urge listeners to be unafraid to challenge religion.

She told Today this morning that culture and religion should not be used as an excuse for denying women equal rights to men around the world.

"We have a lot of progress to celebrate, but the reality is there's still a long way to go, particularly internationally, until we actually get to the position where women truly are regarded as equal to men," she said. "Religion, like everything else, is subject to interpretation: religion is only as good as the people who operate the religion.

"And in the course of that, fallible human beings, mainly men, will make judgements which aren't necessarily true to that basic principle that men and women are of equal value." She said: "Women and men are equal human beings and deserving of equal respect."

Mrs Blair's own Church forbids the ordination of women, forbids women from using condoms even when their husband has been infected by HIV while working away, and denies the sacrament of communion to women who are divorced and remarried without an annulment, even when a woman's first marriage has broken down because of abandonment for a younger woman by their husband.

She nevertheless focused her criticisms on Islamic countries. She said the laws on divorce and custody of children remained unfair to women in many Islamic countries, such as Egypt. "I think the facts speak for themselves," she said.

She refused to be drawn on specific criticism of Saudi Arabia where women suffer widespread and serious discrimination, including being banned from driving. But she has previously given a speech on women's rights in Saudi Arabia. She also refused to back the Liberal Democrat boycott of the visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, because she believes it important to keep talking to "find cultural change".

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