By Cynthia Johnston
CAIRO, April 30 (Reuters) - Official foot-dragging means Egypt's Baha'i religious minority is still struggling to get identity papers, despite a landmark court ruling seen as a challenge to the Muslim religious establishment, a rights group says.
A January court ruling lets the unrecognised Baha'i minority obtain state documents if they omit their faith. Baha'is regard their faith's 19th-century founder as the latest in a line of prophets including Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights said that three months after the court ruling, it was still unable to obtain proper identity documents for the teenage twins of Raouf Hindy, who had brought the legal case, or for any other Baha'is.
The authorities were also refusing to issue identity papers for Christians who converted to Islam and then sought to revert to Christianity, despite a legal ruling in their favour in February.
Both rulings represented a challenge to Egypt's Muslim religious establishment, which rejects conversion away from Islam and has long resisted recognising faiths other than Islam, Christianity or Judaism.
But the government had also not filed an appeal in the Baha'i case during a 60-day appeals period, raising optimism that the ruling would ultimately be put into effect, if slowly.
"We are encouraged by the positive signal that they did not appeal. But we think that all the necessary changes should not take three months," said Hossam Bahgat, head of the Egyptian Initiative, which represented the Baha'is in court.
Interior Ministry officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Bahgat said officials had told Baha'is who sought identity papers that they needed more time to implement changes.
The ruling should give members of the tiny Baha'i community access to documents, largely denied them since 2004, needed to marry, enrol in school, drive a car, or open a bank account.
Many Muslims regard Baha'is, who number between 500 and 2,000 in Egypt, as heretics. Rights activists say they face systematic persecution in socially conservative Egypt, the most populous Arab country.
In the Christian reconversion case, the Egyptian Initiative said that none of the 12 Egyptians whose cases were decided in February had been able to obtain new identity cards.
The ruling obliges the Interior Ministry to issue them with birth certificates and papers identifying them as Christians, but their papers would note a previous conversion to Islam -- a caveat rights activists say could lead to discrimination.
Egyptian courts had previously upheld a traditional reading of Islamic law in such cases, blocking conversion from Islam to any other faith, regardless of the convert's original religion.
While Egyptian law is largely secular and modelled on the French legal system, personal status issues such as conversion, marriage and divorce are governed by religious laws of the relevant community. (Editing by Jon Boyle)
