CAIRO: The civil rights and legislative committees of the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) have finalized the draft law regulating the building of churches and mosques, according to Hafez Abu Saeda, director of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and member of the NCHR. The new law is meant to replace the current law which regulates the construction, expansion, and renovation of houses of worship, creating equality between regulations to build churches and mosques. It includes around 11 articles that set rules as to the number, places and means of procuring licenses for building places of worship. The law aims to shorten the time involved in the process as well as create specialized courts to deal with lawsuits related disputes over places of worship. One of the main departures from the existing law is that it achieves more parity between mosques and churches when it comes to expansion and renovation regulations. Under the current law, permission from the governor is needed to construct a new church, while the building of a new mosque carries no such requirement. "We have already completed the draft law and will present it to the government right after Eid [post-Ramadan feast], Abu Saeda said. "But the government will decide when the People's Assembly has debated it. Talk of this new law started last June, a few weeks after a sectarian clash took place in a Luxor village, leaving 13 men and women injured during a fight over ownership of a piece of land. This clash came one month after the Ayyat incident on May 11 in Bamha, leaving 11 Christians injured and 35 Muslims arrested. On Wednesday June 13, negotiations about means to solve problems that lead to sectarian clashes involved a roundtable talk hosted by the NCHR to discuss the laws regulating permission to build churches and mosques. Minister of Housing, Utilities and Urban Communities Ahmed Maghrabi, Hafez Abu Saeda and Mohamed Fayek, head of Civil and Political Rights Unit at the NCHR attended the meeting. Saad Zaghloul, a Coptic appeals lawyer, told Daily News Egypt in a previous interview that no regulations have been implemented in the constitution regarding equality in building churches and mosques since a law was issued in the 1800s during the Mohamed Ali era. Obtaining a license to build a church has always been very difficult and not as easy as it is with mosques, he said. The old law stipulated that churches should seek permission from the president himself. Recently, it s been modified and the license can be obtained directly from the governor; but this adjustment didn t make it any easier for Christians. According to Zaghloul, both governors and district council members obstruct, or at least make it difficult, for Copts to get approval and even when they do, the subsequent procedures take much longer than they do when compared to building mosques which do not need any actual authorization. Even a small issue like renovating an old church s bathroom requires permission from the head of the district council, he added.
