Iraq’s highest appellate court has affirmed a ruling that grants a Christian woman recognition as a follower of Jesus rather than the Muslim designation forced on her under Iraqi law, ordering officials to fix her religious listing in the state’s records. The woman goes by the pseudonym Maryam. Iraqi law had listed her as Muslim by default, but the new ruling directs officials to change that listing to Christian, according to the legal advocacy organization ADF International, which supported her case. Maryam and her two sisters grew up in a Christian home. When their mother left their father and married a Muslim man, Iraqi law converted the children to Islam, the group said. That change stemmed from Article 26(2) of Iraq’s National Card Law No. 3 of 2016, which states that “minor children shall follow the religion of the parent who has converted to Islam.” Once she was old enough under Iraqi law to act on her own, Maryam brought her case in January 2025, asking officials to list her as Christian rather than Muslim.
A lower court ruled in her favour, finding she had the right to choose her faith and have it correctly entered in the government’s database. The Court of Cassation affirmed that ruling. Maryam’s two younger sisters are still listed as Muslim in the state’s records. ADF International said similar claims will be filed for each sister once they turn 18. Kelsey Zorzi, senior counsel and director of advocacy for global religious freedom at Alliance Defending Freedom, said the ruling deserves commendation and called it a grant of freedom that lets Maryam’s state-issued documents show her Christian faith correctly. “Christians and other religious minorities across Iraq and the broader Middle East suffer real harm when governments assign them a religion that is not their own,” Zorzi said. She added that in a region where family and legal affairs such as marriage and inheritance follow religious lines, individuals rather than governments should hold the power to pick their own faith.
Maryam’s case points to a larger pattern in South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, where some governments log citizens’ faith in state records or on identity papers and make it hard to change, the group said. Officials sometimes impose these labels without a person’s consent, whether by mistake, through inheritance from a parent who converted, or under pressure from state policy. In Iraq and in countries including Bangladesh, Egypt, Malaysia and Pakistan, incorrect or imposed religious labels can force children into religious education programs that do not match their own faith and can create barriers to marriage, ADF International said. The same labels can automatically assign children a religion drawn from a parent’s records, complicate inheritance, generate conflicts under family law and pull non-Muslims into cases decided under Sharia, according to the group.
In some instances, parents whose faith is wrongly listed choose to omit their own names from a child’s birth certificate, so the incorrect label is not inherited, which then creates its own legal problems for the family, the group explained. Iraq does not print religion on physical identification cards, unlike some of its neighbours, but the government keeps the designation in an internal database, where it can still bring real legal and personal costs. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees that “everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” including the right to pick a religion of one’s own.
Source: Christian Post