Egypt bans protests at places of worship, opens churches closed by Mubarak

Egypt’s caretaker government has banned protests and sit-ins in front of places of worship, and accepted requests to open churches that were closed during the toppled regime of President Hosni Mubarak, Al Arabiya reported on Wednesday.


The government has also decided that it would enforce a ban on using religious slogans in elections, Agence-France-Presse reported.

The government will also prepare a law within a month to ease restrictions on building churches and the country’s cabinet committee was tasked with “studying the project of unifying laws for the construction of places of worship, to be completed within 30 days.”

While, churches had been closed since they undertook renovations and expansions without the consent of the government, authorities have agreed to open them after repeated requests from Coptic Christians.

Egypt’s current law dates back to Ottoman times, where Christians are required to seek the ruler's permission before building churches, including consent to renovate or repair them.

The decision is usually delegated to governors, who often consulted security services on the possible reaction of Muslim residents to having a church in their midst.

Building churches has sometimes led to sectarian clashes with Muslims.

Egypt’s state-sponsored human rights council said on Wednesday that a security vacuum and a rise in Islamist extremism contributed to deadly mob attacks on Cairo churches this week, Agence-France Presse reported.

The National Council for Human Rights, which was established by government decree in 2003, demanded increased security for houses of worship and the speedy return of police, especially in poorer neighborhoods like Imbaba.

The organization also said that attempts by supporters of the ousted government of Hosni Mubarak played a role in last Saturday’s violence, which killed 15 people according to its preliminary fact-finding report.

“The tremendous changes Egypt is undergoing since the great revolution of January 25 has brought out a number of phenomena directly linked to the Imbaba incident,” AFP quoted the report.

Chief among them was “the general absence of security that has given outlaws an increasing role and the spread of illegal weapons,” it said.

The report also blamed “the intensification of extremist religious interpretations that propose rearranging Egyptian society to exclude Christians, as they are considered wards of the state without rights to religious protection,” it said.

The attacks in the poor district of Imbaba began after Muslims, including hard-line Salafi fundamentalists, surrounded a church they said was holding a convert against her will.

The country is set to vote in September in its first parliamentary election since the overthrow of president Hosni Mubarak in February.

(Dina Al-Shibeeb, an editor at Al Arabia