Albanian Muslim women who wish to wear a headscarf when having their picture taken for the country’s new biometric indentity cards will be allowed to do so as long as the headscarf fullfils certain conditions, the Albanian government said on Thursday.
The new documents are seen as crucial to avert election fraud in the upcoming parliamentary election in June. They have also been one of the conditions of the European Union before it will include Albanian in its ‘White Schengen List’ that allows visa-free travel to and within the bloc.
Local NGOs said only a tiny minority of Muslim women in Albania wore headscarves, and the government’s decision met with far from universal approval.
“The religious rights of a small groups should not override the society’s need for security,” said Ermelinda Kapedani, a project manager with the NGO ‘For Albanian Women’. “The identity card process is too important for women and the general public in this country to be compromised.”
Unofficial statistics suggest some 70 percent of Albanians are culturally Muslim — mainly Sunni, with a significant number following the Bektashi order — some 20 percent are Christian Orthodox, and 10 percent are Catholics.
The last census to include religious denomination was carried out in 1946, and in 1967, Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha declared the country the first atheist nation in the world. According to the 2007 Religious Freedom Report by the U.S. State Department, less than 40 percent of all Albanians are currently actively religious, and intermarriage between different groups is so common as to be completely unremarkable.
For the purposes of the ID pictures, the Ministry of Interior agreed with Muslim authorities and settled on three particular models of headscarf attire that will be allowed.
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