DNE: ID card policy violates religious freedom, say rights groups

ID card policy violates religious freedom, say rights groups

By Liam Stack
First Published: November 13, 2007

CAIRO - Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights called on the government to allow Egyptian citizens to list their actual religion on national ID cards and other necessary official documents in a joint report released on Monday.

At the age of 16, all Egyptians are required to obtain a national ID card that states their religious affiliation.

Religion is listed on most official documents, including birth certificates, although in some cases the religion written on the ID card is different from the religion listed at birth.

No law on the books requires people to believe only in Islam, Christianity or Judaism, and activists say that Egyptians are guaranteed freedom of belief by both international and domestic laws.

But according to the new report, members of the Baha’i faith, as well as those who have converted from Islam, are systematically prevented from getting official documents listing their true religious beliefs.

Many say they are bullied or forced into lying about their religion, and some are later prosecuted for fraud if police learn that they are practicing a different religion than the one listed on their ID. Activists say that this is the fate that befalls many converts.

“The problem that we identify in this report is that Ministry of Interior officials systematically prevent some people, in particular Baha’is and people who have converted from Islam, from properly identifying themselves in their documents,” says Joe Stork, Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Division at Human Rights Watch.

Baha’is and converts are often unable to acquire any documents at all, and are consigned to a bleak state of official non-existence.

Without proper government identification, it is impossible to accomplish many basic tasks, such as going to a hospital, getting a job, collecting a pension or enrolling in a university.

“This is a violation of religious freedom that has much broader implications on a whole range of people’s rights,” says Stork. “This is not based on any Egyptian law, and our message today is that the government should begin to follow its own laws.”

The rights groups say that the restrictions on people’s official religious status are not sanctioned by existing Egyptian law, but rather come from some officials’ misguided belief that allowing people to record their actual faith would encourage heresy and violate Islamic law.

Under certain interpretations of Islamic law, both converts from Islam and those who believe in faiths beside the three “revealed” religions are considered apostates.

Since sharia is legally considered one component of public order in Egypt, some officials at the Ministry of Interior consider recognition of conversion and other religions a threat to society.

But Islamic law is not a monolithic body, says Hossam Bahgat, the Director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

Islamic jurists have reached no consensus on what punishments, if any, should be meted out to people considered apostates in the here and now.

Matters of Islamic jurisprudence are also far outside the jurisdiction of bureaucrats inside the Ministry of Interior’s Civil Status Department, he says.

“We agree with many Islamic scholars that the state is under no obligation to punish people for their religious beliefs and that it should not impose worldly penalties on people who leave the Islamic faith,” he says.

“We are not saying there is a consensus supporting our opinion, we are saying there is no consensus supporting any opinion on this matter. Scholars widely disagree on the issue.”

Furthermore, he argues, the Egyptian penal code does not forbid conversion from Christianity to Islam, or bar citizens from practicing a religion outside of Islam, Christianity or Judaism.

“For the government to say that sharia requires these violations of religious freedom and equality is both a violation of international law and of sharia itself,” he added.

The Egyptian Baha’i community is small, numbering no more than 2,000 people. For decades they have lived peacefully beside their Muslim, Christian and Jewish countrymen.

But the community began to face hardship in the 1950s, when Arab nationalists cast a suspicious gaze on their faith and its world headquarters in Haifa, a formerly Palestinian town that had recently become part of the State of Israel.

Egyptian Baha’is have been able to obtain national ID cards in the past, which until recently were hand-written. Under the old system, workers at the Ministry’s Civil Status Department were allowed to write ‘other’ or simply leave a dash in the space left blank for religious affiliation.

But the system of hand-written ID cards and birth certificates have been steadily phased out in recent years, and may be declared null and void as soon as this January.

They are being replaced by sleeker computer printed versions, but Ministry guidelines now forbid people to leave their religious affiliation blank, and only a rare few are allowed to be marked “other.”

Wafaa Hindi and her family, all Bahai, say they live a life full of worrying bureaucratic hardships because the government will not issue them official documents that list their true religion.

Her two sons, Nabil and Kareem, were both given hand-written birth certificates listing their religion as Baha’i.

But when the Ministry of the Interior modernized the country’s birth registries, putting everyone’s information on computer databases, the whole family’s religious affiliation was changed.

To make matters worse, each member of her family was assigned a different religion.

“Nabil’s religion is listed as ‘other.’” She says. “ But Kareem is listed as a Muslim, and my husband Sami and I are both listed as Christians. It’s like we are a mixed salad. But this is not me, this is not any of us – we are Baha’i.”

Now Nabil, her oldest son, faces expulsion from Suez Canal University because he does not have proper identification.

“We are so afraid for our son,” she says. “Anyone can stop him in the street and ask for his ID, and he doesn’t have one.”

Hindi says she does not understand why the government does not let them list their actual religion on their IDs, or at the very least let them leave the cards blank. She sees a difference between official toleration of the Baha’i faith and official endorsement.

“If the government says that I am a Baha’i and recognizes that in the official documents I need, then that is not the same thing as them agreeing with my religion or recognizing four revealed religions,” she says.

“Just saying that they recognize that I have my own religious beliefs does not mean that they believe them too.”