NDP and independent MPs join the Muslim Brotherhood to dilute the provisions contained in the draft child law. It is the watered down version, reports Reem Leila, that will now be presented to the People's Assembly for ratification The People's Assembly Legislative Committee debated the new child draft law proposed by the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) in a heated session last week, with committee members replicating the divisions which occurred during the bill's first reading. Then members of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) had joined with Muslim Brotherhood MPs in demanding amendments to the draft law which seeks to criminalise Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), the physical abuse of children, and increase the legal age for marriage. Critics of the draft law claimed that it was attempting to outlaw practices that are common in Egyptian society. In Legislative Committee hearings they watered down the provisions in the draft law. Mandatory fines of between LE1,000 and LE5,000 and prison sentences of between three months and two years for anyone found guilty of FGM have now been removed from the draft. The position of Mohamed El-Omda was typical of MPs. Despite insisting that while, personally, he was opposed to FGM, he argued that "people should not be punished for practising their customs and traditions." "If we apply prison sentences everyone in Upper Egypt will end up in prison," he said. Outlawing female circumcision and punishing parents for the physical abuse of their children are "ideas imported from the West" and will lead to dysfunctional families. There are no nationwide statistics on the abuse of minors though Mushira Khattab, secretary-general of the NCCM, says estimates of the number of children who face violence in schools reach 50 per cent, and 70 per cent in urban areas. The PA's Legislative Committee opposed custodial sentences -- of not less than three months and not more than two years, with the provision the sentence be doubled if the perpetrators are one or other of the child's parents -- for anyone found guilty of the physical abuse of children. While Islam does not prohibit parents from punishing their children, severe punishments are inappropriate, said MP Mustafa Bakri. "Islam calls on us to choose proper and beautiful names for our children," he offered by way of argument. "How then can Islam be used as a pretext to justify severe physical punishment of children?" The committee also annulled the article obliging members of the public who are aware of a child being abused to report the fact to the relevant authorities and stipulating a fine of between LE500 and LE2,000 or prison sentences of not more than three months for anyone failing to do so. It has also removed a clause that would have banned marriages for girls less than 18 years old, with MPs arguing that Sharia encourages early marriages which remain common in rural areas. Raising the legal age for marriage from 16 to 18 would, they argued, lead villagers to resort to urfi marriage with all its negative repercussions. Khalil Mustafa, advisor to the NCCM, criticised the alliance between Muslim Brotherhood MPs, the ruling NDP and some independents. "A narrow-minded religious rhetoric" had been imposed on the new law, he said, by those who represent the most reactionary strain within Egypt's political class. "The draft law has become a battleground between those promoting a longed- for modern state and those seeking to preserve an obsolete status quo," he said. The ban on FGM, he pointed out, had been approved by Al-Azhar and leading Islamic scholars, including Youssef El-Qaradawi and Mohamed Selim El-Awwa. In recent years the public has become increasingly aware of the dangers of the practice and the time is ripe, he argued, to try and eradicate it through legal measures. The committee also insisted on changes to the draft provision that would have allowed mothers to give children their own name in cases where the father refuses to acknowledge paternity or where the name of the father is unknown. Previously, such children had existed in a legalistic limbo: without the father's name no birth certificate could be issued and without a birth certificate as far as the state is concerned the child does not exist. Now, rather than give the child their own name, as the draft had suggested, mothers will be allowed to fill in the blank on the birth certificate with an invented name which will then be registered at their local police station. The new draft law also makes DNA testing mandatory in lawsuits where paternity is contested.
