E/CN.4/2003/66/Add.1 page 16 77. Both texts allege that Christians are luring the young and idle and converting them to Christianity in exchange for material goods or promises of visas to Europe - visas which, according to the Minister of Religious Affairs, are granted with the connivance of certain embassies. These individuals are said to hand out bibles and religious video cassettes in profusion and hold prayer meetings on Fridays to divert people’s attention and hide the fact that they belong to the Christian Church. 78. The texts are in agreement that conversions are becoming more frequent by the day, and that evangelization campaigns are chiefly being staged in Kabylie with a view to undermining the territorial integrity of the country; they differ in their identification of those responsible and the numbers of conversions taking place. 79. According to the representatives of religious minorities, the individuals trying to convert people to Christianity are not - contrary to what is asserted in these texts - connected with the Catholic and Protestant churches in Algeria. Rather, they come chiefly from France and the United States of America, and one was said to have been expelled by the Algerian authorities after outspoken statements appeared in the press. The Christian communities say that such underhand dealings, which are an insult to human dignity, are the work of people who know nothing about the local culture. According to the Director of Public Liberties, these people are affiliated to sectarian movements and are not looked upon kindly either by Algerians or by the Protestant and Catholic churches in Algeria. 80. Other informants contest these reports strongly. They say that the number of conversions is in fact tiny, but wilfully exaggerated in order to demonize Kabylie although access to the region is so difficult that the figures quoted cannot be verified. The Director of Religious Affairs of Oran wilaya said that no case of conversion had been brought to his attention. The Ministry of the Interior’s Director of Public Liberties considered it to be a small-scale phenomenon. 81. The religious authorities said that they treated requests for conversion submitted to the approved churches with extreme caution. Quite apart from the fact that conversion is a procedure that takes several years, they said that checks were first made to ensure that the individuals concerned were adults and were not going through the motions in order to obtain a visa or to get away from their families. Only 10 to 15 people were said to have been converted in recent years, and there were not more than 100 cases in total, chiefly because of the social pressure that made conversion an ordeal. B. Worship 1. Muslims 82. According to the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Algeria currently has 11,941 mosques in operation, including 1,840 that are still being completed and 1,079 under construction. Besides this, 39 churches have been converted into mosques. 83. These figures need to be viewed in the light of the Ministry’s claim that one new mosque is built every day.