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| The Registration Office of the Islamic Republic of Iran |
After four months of administrative and legal procedures, Iran's Registration Department has finally agreed to issue ID cards for two Azerbaijani babies named Yağış and Urmu.
Vahid Bağırpur, the father of the twin children, announced that after four months of administrative and legal procedures, he had succeeded in obtaining ID cards for his children.
The Turkish family from Tabriz applied to the Registration Department after the birth of their twin daughters on January 28, intending to obtain ID cards with the names Yağış and Urmu. However, the authorities at the Registration Department initially refused to issue ID cards with these names.
According to a post shared by Vahid Bağırpur on his Instagram page, the family was forced to take legal action after being unable to get ID cards with the names they chose for their children.
Regarding the process of obtaining an ID card for Yağış, Bağırpur wrote, “Because of the name Yağış, one of our friends managed to get an ID card for his daughter after several months of struggle last year, so we used this as a basis to force the Registration Department to issue an ID card for our child with that name.”
In Iran, the Registration Department cannot block the registration and issuance of ID cards for names that have already been approved. Thus, the cultural struggle of families in Iranian Azerbaijan to obtain ID cards for their children with Turkish names has helped other families who wish to give their children Turkish names.
Bağırpur also mentioned that he had to go to court to obtain an ID card for his other child, Urmu. He said they had to prove in court the meaning of the name Urmu and that it was a female name, which the court eventually accepted. Bağırpur stated that on May 22, he obtained an ID card for his child Urmu on the anniversary of the May Uprising in Iranian Azerbaijan.
“After four months of back-and-forth, complaints, and several court hearings, we were finally able to present documents proving that Urmu was the old name of the city of Urmia, which has beautiful meanings in different languages, one of which is ‘city of paradise’ or ‘city of water.’ After presenting all the documents proving that the name of a city can also be a female name in various languages, they were finally forced to issue the ID card today, on the anniversary of the Azerbaijani people’s uprising against state apartheid,” said Urmu's father.
The Registration Department of the Islamic Republic of Iran forces families to choose names from a predefined list. Azerbaijani families must go through long and exhausting administrative and legal procedures to be able to give their children Turkish names. Nevertheless, in recent years, the demand for Turkish names among Azerbaijani families has increased, and Turkish names have entered the list of popular names.
Link to the original text in Turkish on the Azerbaijani section of Voice of America:
İran Qeydiyyat İdarəsi "Yağış" və "Urmu" adlı uşaqlara şəxsiyyət vəsiqəsi verib