Nun's jailing highlights division on adoption

Philanthropist is convicted of forgery and child trafficking after selling two orphans to a childless Egyptian-American couple.

Iris Botros, a US citizen of Egyptian origin accused of trying to illegally adopt Egyptian children, is escorted into court in Cairo on Thursday.

CAIRO // Before she was sentenced to five years in prison for child trafficking, Mariam Ragab lived the quiet life of a Christian nun in the down-at-heel neighbourhood of Shubra in Cairo. "Mariam is a woman who never married and who spent the past 22 years of her life serving the people," said her nephew, Girgis Romani, who tenderly sifted through a wardrobe full of Ragab's left-behind clothing, all in varying shades of austere grey. "She searched for the poor and needy people and she helped them."

On Thursday, Ragab was convicted of forgery and child trafficking along with 10 other defendants, including three couples who came from America in order to adopt Egyptian children, as well as several members of Ragab's small Christian charitable organisation. But according to Mr Romani, helping was all Ragab thought she was doing in October 2008, when she "sold" two orphaned children to a childless Egyptian-American woman for 26,000 Egyptian pounds (Dh17,450).

While the two Abrahamic faiths of Islam and Christianity share a similar moral paradigm, there are few ethical questions to which the answers diverge as sharply as that of adoption. Whereas Islam treats the practice as a violation of God's law as it is espoused in the Quran, Christian organisations throughout the world offer adoption as an important part of their ministerial services. And in Egypt, an intensely religious nation where 10 per cent of the population is Christian, such a rare difference in values can seem like a vast gap in understanding. But if Ragab and her fellow defendants found that gap impossible to span, their story also crystallised the weaknesses of Egypt's family law in reconciling two opposing religious outlooks.

For Muslims, there is no debate. Article 2 of the Egyptian constitution states that "the principles of the Islamic Sharia are the principle source of Egyptian legislation". In practice, that means that no law should forbid what Sharia expressly allows, nor should it allow what Sharia forbids, such as adoption. "Adoption allows forbidden matters. For example, it allows the adopted male child to see his adopting mother in exposing clothes, while he is not a real kin," said Khalil Mustafa, the head of Cairo's Family Court. "In this way, the adopting father commits a sin and lets the adopted child commit a sin."

Conscious that such a requirement might prove onerous for the Christian minority, family law in Egypt is more parochial, offering a different set of rules for the country's two major faiths. For example, Muslims in Egypt are eligible to seek civil divorces, whereas the Coptic Orthodox Church, whose traditions predate even Catholicism, offers no such outlet. Egyptian Christians are required to seek the permission of the Coptic pope before they can end a marriage.

For adoption, the law for Christians is at best obscure, at worst, non-existent. Peter al Naggar, a lawyer for the Coptic Orthodox Church, said that Egypt's civil code allows adoption for Christians, but that the law is rarely observed in court. "It's in the Egyptian Christian law, but we can't work with it because the government doesn't allow us to work with it," said Mr al Naggar, who added that the practical differences in family law were confined almost entirely to divorce. Christians must comply with Sharia law even on matters of inheritance, which awards male heirs twice the amount that is awarded to female heirs. "It's only on paper," he said of Christian statutes.

But Mr Mustafa said while family laws were indeed separate, the Coptic Christian laws contained no reference whatsoever to adoption. The best way to clear the haze around Christian adoption, Mr Mustafa said, would be for the Egyptian government to encourage and promote the Islamic foster care system, known as kafala. The kafala system allows adults to financially sponsor orphaned children, who may either live in their sponsors' homes or in charitable institutions. Kafala, however, forbids sponsored children from taking their adult sponsors' names or inheriting their wealth.

Mr Khalil declined to speculate on how adoption's illegality affects some of Egypt's more profound social problems. The poorest neighbourhoods of Cairo and Alexandria, for example, play host to armies of street children. The causes of child homelessness in Egypt are manifold. Some of the children were abandoned as infants, some fled violent or impoverished households while others were rejected by parents who remarried and started new families.

Ragab thought she was saving the children, who are now living in an institution, from a life on the streets, said her nephew, Mr Romani - a fate shared by as many as two million Egyptian youth. "The only issue was that she cared that these children not be street children," said Mr Romani, who lived with Ragab before she was arrested in December, assisting his aunt in the small charitable organisation she supervised. "She lives her life for these people. Go out and ask the people. They'll tell you."

Whether legalising adoption would mitigate Egypt's street children problem remains a point of debate - albeit one that is barely discussed and rarely studied. "I don't think that the lack of adoption in Egypt is a contributing factor, although it might need some more research," said Alaa Sebeh, the programme and advocacy director for Save the Children UK, an international child rights group. "In Egypt, it's the opposite, in my opinion. Those who are abandoned are left sometimes in front of mosques as very young babies, and there are lots of NGOs [non-governmental organisations] who are hosting these children through the kafala system."

But the real reason for the harsh charges Ragab faced may be more sinister. Lawyers and child welfare experts say the government may have decided to make an example of Ragab and her co-defendants. In June 2008, Egypt passed a new, comprehensive law on human trafficking as a response to growing international pressure. Chief among Egypt's critics is the US Department of State, whose Trafficking in Persons report has become a perennial annoyance for Egypt's government.

In addition to offering numerous new guarantees for children's rights, said Mr Sebeh, the law also updates Egypt's definition of human trafficking and gives the crime a mandatory sentence of at least five years in prison. Ragab, and two of her co-defendants, may have been among the first to see the full force of the law. As far as Mr Romani is concerned, his aunt was more the victim of political grandstanding than religious discrimination. In an interview two days before her conviction, Mr Romani described his aunt as a sort of latter day Job - the biblical archetype of bad things happening to good people. A three-time cancer survivor, Ragab awoke every morning at 7am to patrol the streets of Shubra, searching and assisting those in need.

It was Ragab's generosity, he said, that led to her own undoing. "The doctors told her that Christian girls who sin sometimes get children, and it's better for those children to be adopted than to be thrown in the street," said Mr Romani of the doctors who falsified birth certificates for the "adopted" children. "So in good faith and kindheartedness, which led to stupidity, she believed them. Her only concern was that those children be brought up in a good situation."