A BAHRAINI family has managed to reclaim its surname after a court ruled to deprive them of it for more than a year in a wrangle that erupted over tribal relations.
The case began when eight individuals of a family raised a suit against 15 members of another family with the same surname, claiming that they have no right to use the name.
Although both the Lower and High Civil Courts ruled to strip the defendants of the name in 2021 and 2022, a final Civil Cassation Court ruling has returned the surname to them.
“The decision was overturned when the defendants proved that they possessed the name for more than 60 years,” said lawyer Zainab Aldairi, who acted as the family’s defence on behalf of lawyer Shahinaz Ali.
“They presented as evidence a passport from 1958 belonging to their father, which had the last name on it,” she told the GDN.
In the initial 2021 lawsuit at the Lower Civil Court, the plaintiffs claimed that the defendants did not belong to the tribe from whom the surname descends. They also accused them of acquiring it in the 1970s through bureaucratic means.
The plaintiffs consisted of eight male cousins in their thirties and fifties, while the defendants included six siblings in their fifties and sixties, along with seven of their children.
Other defendants on the case were the Nationality, Passports and Residence Affairs, Information and eGovernment Authority, Survey and Land Registration Bureau, the Health Ministry’s Public Health Directorate and State Cases Authority.
These government authorities were sued by the plaintiffs who demanded that they remove the defendants’ surname from their records.
After receiving the complaint, the court handed the case to the Surname Committee at the Justice, Islamic Affairs and Endowments Ministry, who issued a recommendation to remove the name.
This was not the plaintiffs’ first attempt to compel the other family to remove the name by legal means – in 2001 they disputed the defendants’ possession of the name. However, they did not succeed due to insufficient evidence. They appealed this decision in 2006 and 2007 to no avail.
In a 2001 hearing, four of the defendants told the court that they were not aware of the origins of the name and admitted to not being descendants of the tribe which the plaintiffs said they came from.
Based on this, the Lower Civil Court in November 2021ruled in the favour of the plaintiffs. “There are laws that exist to protect families from others falsely claiming a relation to them,” read court documents. “This is done so that genealogies are not muddled.”
The defendants appealed this ruling at the High Civil Court, but the decision was upheld.
In a last attempt to retain the surname, the defendants managed to find evidence to the early presence of it from at least the 1950s, although the plaintiffs had claimed the name was acquired two decades later.
The court found the travel document as sufficient evidence, and the previous decisions were overturned.
zainab@gdnmedia.bh
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