A six-year prison term will await anyone found guilty of “removing sexual organs in whole or in part”, as the “rights of the child” always exceed the “right of the parents to give their children guidance when it comes to religion”.
While circumcising girls has been illegal in Iceland since 2005, no laws have stopped the practice against boys.
The island nation of some 300 000 people include only a few hundred Muslims and Jews, but Iceland does not currently have an organised Jewish community. This year however, it is said to be receiving its first resident Jewish rabbi, The Times Of Israel reported.
The leaders of Jewish communities in four Nordic countries meanwhile complained that the bill “would guarantee” that no Jewish community was established there.
If passed, “Iceland would be the only country to ban one of the most central, if not the most central rite in the Jewish tradition in modern times,” Aron Verständig, Dan Rosenberg-Asmussen, Ervin Kohn and Yaron Nadbornik stated in an open letter against the bill.
“Banning Brit Milah [the rite of circumcision] will be an effective deterrent and will guarantee that no Jewish community will be established,” they wrote.
The bill was crafted on advice from doctors in Denmark, who have said boys under the age of 18 should not be circumcised. The chair of the Doctors’ Association Ethics Board, Lise Moller, said it was wrong to deny an individual the right to choose.
“To be circumcised should be an informed, personal choice,” she said.
Norway’s 2015 legislation on nonmedical circumcision introduced regulation while allowing the Muslim and Jewish custom under certain terms.
In Europe, circumcision is also being viewed as a foreign import associated mostly with immigration and denounced as a primitive form of child abuse.
In Germany, after a long and heated debate, a controversial new circumcision law was passed after a ruling by a Cologne regional court in the spring of 2012 which set off a fierce debate over Muslim and Jewish ritual circumcision. The court decided that non-medical circumcision amounted to bodily harm.
Wolfgang Gahr, general secretary of Germany’s academy for children and young people’s medicine (DAKJ), told Deutsche Welle that if the ritual cannot be avoided, “it should at least take place under medical supervision and be painless”.
But Christian Bahls, head of the Mogis association, which advocates the physical integrity and sexual self-determination of children, said that the German law still does not protect children’s well-being properly.