After film, push strengthens for blasphemy clause in Egypt's constitution

Mr. Ibrahim says that since the uprising that unseated former leader Hosni Mubarak, the law has been increasingly used against Christians. In April, a court in the southern city of Assiut sentenced a 17-year-old Christian to three years in jail for publishing a cartoon on his Facebook page that mocked Muhammad and Islam, and distributing it to his classmates. Crowds in his hometown rioted after the case was publicized, burning down Christian homes.

But appeals courts have sometimes stepped in and reversed such verdicts, as they did in the case of famous Egyptian actor Adel Imam. Last week a court overturned a conviction for defaming Islam in several of his films, for which a previous court sentenced him to three months in prison.

Prohibiting religious insults in the constitution could make overturning such verdicts less likely. Historically, the Supreme Constitutional Court has been “quite good” on some human rights issues, using the constitution as justification to overturn lower court rulings that violated citizens' rights, says Ms. Morayef.

“If it’s embedded in the constitution it will take away another tool that you had in the human rights community,” she says.

Citizens can bring cases

Egyptian daily Al Masry Al Youm reported last week that the proposed article for the new constitution would ban insulting God, “prophets of God, Prophet Mohamed's wives, the righteous caliphs and the prophet's companions." Mr. Bakkar of the Nour Party said that he expects the assembly to accept the article, and that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), Egypt's leading party, has indicated it will not oppose it.

Amr Gharbeia, director of the civil liberties program at EIPR, who has viewed the draft, says it poses further problems because it puts the right to bring cases on this basis in the hands of private citizens, not the public prosecutor.

A similar law that allowed individuals to bring cases against anyone they accused of denigrating religion was changed in 1996, after a prosecution forced liberal Quranic scholar Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid into exile. A group of lawyers offended by his work brought a case against him that ended with a court declaring him an apostate. A court subsequently ordered him to divorce his wife because under Islamic law a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim man.

After this case, the law was changed to give the prosecutor, not normal citizens, the authority to bring such cases. But according to a draft Mr. Gharbeia has seen, the new document would give that right back to individual citizens, which would likely lead to a sharp increase in the number of cases, he says.

And though Christians have increasingly been the target of the current law, it can be used against any minorities. Shiites are marginalized in mostly Sunni Egypt, and, according to Ibrahim, a Shiite man was recently sentenced to three years in prison after a court convicted him of insulting a mosque. That sentence was reduced to one year on appeal, and the man is appealing the sentence again.

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