The prosecutor in the town of al-Fashn in Beni Sweif some 100km south of Cairo last Thursday ordered the release of the two Coptic children Nabil Nagy Rizq aged nine, and
The prosecutor in the town of al-Fashn in Beni Sweif some 100km south of Cairo last Thursday ordered the release of the two Coptic children Nabil Nagy Rizq aged nine, and Mina Nady Farag aged 10, who had been caught and charged with deriding Islam.
Desecrating the Qur’an?
The two children who come from the hamlet of Ezbet Marco had been seen by a Muslim neighbour playing with a piece of paper that had been torn out of a Qur’an. He assumed they had desecrated the Qur’an, raised an uproar over the issue, and headed to the prosecutor’s office in the nearby town of Fashn where he filed a complaint against them for deriding Islam.
In the meantime, and fearing that matters would unduly escalate, a ‘conciliation session’ was held between the Muslim and Coptic clerics in the village, during which they all agreed to contain the matter, especially that the parents of the boys insisted they had never got hold of any Qur’an, but were playing near a pile of garbage in which they found the torn page. The boys could not read or write, they said, so had no way of knowing the content of the page.
Despite the conciliation, the children were caught by the police, questioned by the prosecution, then held in a centre for juvenile delinquents till the following hearing which was set for 7 October.
The outcry by human rights organisations against the holding of the children led to their release last Thursday. The two children were handed to their parents in the presence of representatives from Fashn bishopric. The children were released due to their young age but the hearing scheduled for next Sunday is still on.
Father Abdel-Qodos Shehata, deputy of Fashn bishopric, told Watani that since the children were delivered to their parents, the village is calm and everyone understands that they are mere children and that they neither read nor write.
Human and child rights
The capture of the children and the legal action against them—Egyptian law sets the age for legal responsibility at 12—had human rights activists up in arms.
The Civil Rights for Christians (CRC) movement called for a demonstration on Saturday in front of the House of the High Court in Downtown Cairo to protest the illegality of the proceedings against the children. It later called the demonstration off when the children were released, but issued a strongly worded statement on the matter.
The statement questioned why the children were released only after international rights organisations including Amnesty International and Freedom House condemned the action against the children? Did not Egypt realise,” the statement said, “that, as signatory to international treaties on the rights of children, it was bound to defend these rights whether or not international and local activists protested?” The implication of children in ‘elastic charges’ that involved religion was deplorable, CRC insisted.
The movement thanked all parties and NGOs which supported the rights of the children, and criticised the silence of those who did not lift a finger to defend them.
For its part, the Egyptian Coalition for the Rights of the Child strongly condemned the detention of the children. Its head, Hany Hilal, warned against the implication of children in the ongoing escalation of sectarianism in Egypt.
Reported by Girgis Waheeb, Nader Shukry, Robeir al-Faris, and Hanan Fikry
WATANI International
6 October 2012