Syria’s government has ruled that the Yazidi community must adhere to Islamic personal status laws. The ruling was announced by the Justice Ministr on Sunday and, as such, recognized the Yazidi religion as a sect of Islam as opposed to its own religion, Al-Aaraby, or The New Arab, reported.
The ruling comes after members of the Yazidi community applied to form its own religious court to handle family and personal status law. They will instead have to settle such issues in the Islamic Sharia courts. The Yazidi Council of Syria called the ruling a “flagrant violation of the most basic principles of human rights.”
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Recognized religious minorities under Syrian law, which are entitled to have their own religious courts, include Christianity, Druze and Jewish. The Yazidi observe their own monotheistic religion.
There are up to 40,000 Yazidis living in Syria, mostly in the northern provinces of Hasakah and Aleppo.