Woman faces death sentence for ‘apostasy’
KHARTOUM, Sudan — A pregnant Sudanese woman who married a Christian man was sentenced to hang Thursday after she refused to recant her Christian faith, her lawyer said.
Meriam Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim but whose mother was an Orthodox Christian from Ethiopia, was convicted of “apostasy” on Sunday and given four days to repent and escape death, lawyer Al-Shareef Ali al-Shareef Mohammed said.
The 26-year-old, who is eight months pregnant, was sentenced after that grace period expired, Mohammed said.
Ibrahim also faces a sentence of flogging by 100 lashes for adultery on the grounds that her marriage to a Christian man from South Sudan is considered void under Islamic law.
Mohammed said he intends to appeal Ibrahim’s conviction.
“The judge has exceeded his mandate when he ruled that Meriam’s marriage was void because her husband was out of her faith,” Mohammed said. “He was thinking more of Islamic Shariah laws than of the country’s laws and its constitution.”
He said Ibrahim’s Muslim father left her mother when she was a child and her mother raised her as a Christian.
Ibrahim’s case first came to the attention of authorities in August, when members of her father’s family complained that she was born a Muslim but married a Christian man.
They claimed that her birth name was Afdal and that she changed it to Meriam. Mohammed said the document produced by relatives to show she was given a Muslim name at birth was a fake.
“I was never a Muslim. I was raised a Christian from the start,” Ibrahim said.
The sentence has been condemned by the international community.
In a joint statement, the embassies of Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands expressed “deep concern” over her case.
“We call upon the government of Sudan to respect the right to freedom of religion, including one’s right to change one’s faith or beliefs,” they said.
Amnesty International also condemned the sentence, calling it “abhorrent.”
Mohammed, the lawyer, called the conviction rushed and legally flawed since the judge refused to hear key defence witnesses and ignored constitutional provisions on freedom of worship and equality among citizens.
Ibrahim and Daniel Wani, a Christian from southern Sudan who has U.S. citizenship, married in a formal church ceremony in 2011 and have a son, 18-month-old Martin, who is with her in jail. Sudan’s penal code criminalizes the conversion of Muslims into other religions, which is punishable by death.
Wani was acquitted of a charge of harbouring an apostate, according to another defence lawyer, Eman Abdul-Rahim.
Wani fled to the United States as a child to escape the civil war in southern Sudan but later returned, she said.
As in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from marrying non- Muslims, though Muslim men can marry outside their faith. By law, children must follow their father’s religion.
Sudan introduced Islamic Shariah laws in the early 1980s, a move that contributed to the resumption of an insurgency in the mostly animist and Christian south of Sudan.