"Our child Onur has been without an identity card for 3 years. His only fault is that his name is in Turkish," said Ali Hidayati, a resident of West Azerbaijan Province, on social media, sharing that his son, who was born in May 2017, still has not been issued an identity card.
Despite repeatedly applying to Iran's Civil Registration Office over the past 3 years, Hidayati was unable to achieve any results and, therefore, turned to the courts for help.
Ali Hidayati, who lives in Tikantepe (Tikab) city in West Azerbaijan, posted a copy of his application to the court on his Facebook account.
In his application, he wrote, "I respectfully request that three years have passed since the birth of my first and only son, Onur. According to Kamel Muradi's Beautiful Turkish Names book and Riza Ghaffari's Turkish Names Dictionary, the word Onur means strong and honorable. Unfortunately, despite all my applications and submitting the required documents to the city’s registration office, my son still lives without an identity card."
Hidayati also emphasized in his application that his son has been deprived of his citizenship rights for the past three years.
Many families in Iranian Azerbaijan and Tehran face difficulties in obtaining identity cards for their children with Turkish names. Farhad Jafari, the author of the Turkish Human Names dictionary, published in Iran in 2001, previously mentioned in an interview with Voice of America that the situation was even worse in the 1990s.
In the interview, Jafari stated, "I tell those who want to give their children, shop, or company a Turkish name that no preventive law has been written regarding names. However, they (state institutions) are instructed to do everything they can to prevent a Turkish name from being chosen. They create such conditions that a person goes back and forth for days, and then, exhausted, gives up, saying 'whatever the name is, let it be.'"
Link to the original text in Turkish on the Azerbaijani section of Voice of America:
İranda Onur adlı uşağa 3 ildir şəxsiyyət vəsiqəsi verilmir