Cash-strapped Lebanese turn to online civil marriages

BEIRUT — Najwa Sbeity and Omar Abdel Baki had been planning their wedding day for several years. Hailing from different sectarian backgrounds, the Druze-Shiite couple tied the knot in a virtual civil ceremony July 10.

Civil marriage is prohibited in Lebanon and is only allowed to be registered as such if carried out abroad. Religious authorities are the ones to regulate personal status affairs according to each sect's laws and regulations.

Sbeity and Abdel Baki are members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), which advocates for the separation of religion and state and guarantees the right to wed under a unified personal status law.

However, their plan to marry on foreign soil was halted when Sbeity's passport expired, and the earliest appointment available to renew it was in November. The passport crisis began in April when General Security announced it was running out of available passports, shutting down its online platform to book appointments for renewal. Although the platform's suspension ended in June, General Security was still overwhelmed with online applications creating a monthslong backlog of appointments.   

"Through our research we stumbled upon the option to marry online through an American judge in the state of Utah," Sbeity told Al-Monitor. "By doing so, we saved a lot of money."

The cost of getting married in Turkey or Cyprus — the two most popular civil marriage destinations for Lebanese citizens — would have been triple of what they paid now. Plane tickets, visas, hotel reservations and the ceremony's overall costs would have been excessive in the country's current economic crisis, Sbeity said.

"It also meant a lot for us to be able to host all of our loved ones on our special day. We were lucky that our relatives and friends don't have outdated sectarian thoughts that would have challenged our choice," she added.