A 43-YEAR-old man is unable to understand why as a Cypriot citizen his Egyptian wife’s visa requests are repeatedly being denied by Cypriot Embassy officials in Cairo.
Nashat Moner said the Embassy claimed the problem lay with the Interior Ministry’s civil registry and migration department because it had failed to give his wife’s visa application the green light.
He said: “I don’t know why they’re doing this. I don’t know. They keep saying they’ll sort it out, but when? I want to know,” he said.
An Egyptian by birth, Moner, otherwise known as Demetris Mouneer, came to Cyprus in 1991 after he found work as a house painter. Within two years, he met and married a Cypriot woman. The couple remained childless and due to what he said was her gambling addiction, the couple divorced ten years later. In the meantime he had applied for and in 2002 was granted citizenship.
“I didn’t want to be alone forever and the Egyptian Orthodox Church I go to here suggested that I remarry a girl from my hometown and bring her here to live with me since I’m a Cypriot citizen,” Moner told the Cyprus Mail.
He was introduced to Sherin Mahfouz Nagib Morkos, 33, and the pair was married in August last year.
But the couple soon ran into difficulty when they tried to secure an entry visa for Sherin.
“The embassy told me I had to fax them a sworn affidavit confirming I was indeed divorced and that I had no family obligations before I could get a visa for my wife,” he said.
Moner said he returned to Cyprus and secured the necessary documentation as requested by the authorities. However, in September his wife received a letter stating, “the documents submitted by your husband Mr Nashat Moner during the interviews and examination of your application contained false statements and therefore your request for a visa to Cyprus has been refused.”
The 43-year-old said he could not understand what those “false statements” were, and said it might have been that he hadn’t clarified that his divorce claim in his affidavit had referred to his martial status in Cyprus and not to his present marital status with Sheridan.
Either way, he never received any clarification of what the problem had been.
When Moner applied to the civil registry and migration department for his wife’s visa, he was told in December that it had been denied pending a criminal case against him.
He said: “I didn’t know what this criminal case was. When I looked into it I explained about the affidavit and said that I was divorced from my Cypriot wife. The complaint regarding my false statements was subsequently dropped in April and the file closed, yet my [Egyptian] wife has still to join me here.”
He had also provided the civil registry department with the necessary documentation to bring over his wife, including a copy of his clean record issued by the Justice Ministry, a bank guarantee, photocopies of his and Sherin’s passports, and two passport sized photos of her. Despite all this, his bride was still blocked from joining him.
His lawyer, George Michaelides, confirmed it was a Cypriot citizen’s legal right to bring his wife to join him.
Michaelides also said his client had committed no crime and that that there was no criminal case against him, nor had he been called to appear in court.
He said: “This is not the first time EU citizens or Cypriots’ spouses from third countries have been detained. There appears to be a trend of arresting and deporting these spouses without first examining that the marriages are genuine.”
He said he had already written numerous letters asking that Sherin’s visa application be re-examined but that he had received no answer.
“We are waiting for an answer from the civil registry and migration department requesting a reason for why my client’s wife’s visa application was denied. If we do not receive an answer within the month we will take the matter to court,” he said, making reference to a recent Supreme Court decision which stated that as EU nationals, Cypriot citizens’ dependants and immediate family, had a legal right to be with them in Cyprus.
In the meantime, Moner said his wife had gone back to the embassy in Cairo four more times and each time she’d been turned away.
“They told her there’s something about my name that comes up on to the computer screen that hasn’t been cleared and that stops them from granting her a visa, but I don’t know what that is,” the 43-year-old said.
He said his wife had been upset by the situation and that despite his frequent visits to Egypt to see her, the stress of it all had led to the loss of their baby in her sixth month of pregnancy.
Moner said: “We don’t understand why they’re not letting her come here. My wife doesn’t understand why for the past year she’s not been allowed to come here. Neither one of us does since I’m a Cypriot and I’ve got all my papers in order.
“I just want to know what the problem is. Everybody else’s spouse gets a visa so why not me? What’s the problem?”
No one was yesterday available for comment at the Cyprus Embassy in Egypt or the civil registry and migration department.
