Bahá’í World/Volume 31/Bahá’ís in Egypt, Current Situation
Bahá’ís in Egypt[edit]
CURRENT SITUATION[edit]
Oral statement of the Bahá’í International Community to the 59th session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, held from 17 March to 25 April 2003 in Geneva, Switzerland.
The harassment and injustices targeting the Bahá’ís in Egypt are clear violations of freedom of religion or belief. Regrettably, we have not seen any measures taken by the government of Egypt to right these wrongs, and so we are compelled to request that the international community call upon the Egyptian authorities to resolve the issue.
Since 1960, when President Nasser issued Presidential Decree No. 263, the Bahá’ís have been subjected to active persecution in Egypt. This decree singled out the Bahá’í community, dissolved its religious institutions, banned all its religious activities, and suppressed its community life. The decree is still used today to instigate police investigations, arrests, domicile searches, and the destruction of Bahá’í religious literature, and it is restrictively interpreted by the courts in ways that reduce the status of the Bahá’ís to that of second-class citizens.
All members of the community are under strict and constant police surveillance. They have no access to any form of legal marriage, cannot obtain custody of children, child allowances, or alimony, and are often denied access to pensions and inheritance. Not being legally married, they cannot even obtain a family record—a document required by law in Egypt for many official purposes.
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The Bahá’ís are not free to profess their faith in Egypt. Article 46 of the Egyptian Constitution says that “The State guarantees the freedom of belief and the freedom of the exercise of religious rites,” and it makes no mention of recognized religions. But many Bahá’ís have been detained on charges that stemmed from talking to friends in the privacy of their homes about their beliefs, or from gathering in private, in small numbers, for devotional readings and prayers. The authorities consider these to be activities previously performed by Bahá’í Assemblies and thus outlawed, regardless of their peaceful, private, and devotional nature.
The Bahá’ís are regularly denounced as apostates, in the media or in widely publicized court decisions, which are generally accompanied by advocacy of hatred on religious grounds. The Mufti of Egypt and members of the Academy of Islamic Research of the Azhar, who are government appointees, have associated themselves on several occasions with this incitement to hatred and violence, giving it an air of official approval. And the government does not take any action against those who cry out that Bahá’í apostates deserve to be killed. Published documents establishing these facts are easy to obtain. The Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief has mentioned some of them in his reports.
The Bahá’í International Community expressed these concerns in a submission to the Human Rights Committee last year. In the Concluding Observations issued after its review of Egypt’s periodic reports, the Committee deplored the ban on worship imposed on the Bahá’í community in this country. It also expressed concern about “the pressures applied to the judiciary by extremists claiming to represent Islam, who have even succeeded, in some cases, in imposing on courts their own interpretation of the religion.”¹
The Egyptian Bahá’ís are a law-abiding, peaceful community. Their only request is that the government remove all of the official obstructions and restrictions that target them, including Presidential Decree No. 263 of 1960. It is our sincere hope that the authorities will take all of the measures required, so that the Bahá’ís will soon be free to practice their faith in Egypt.
¹ See CCPR/CO/76/EGY, p. 5, para. 17.