June 6
SUDAN:
Sudan's haphazard sharia legal system has claimed too many victims--The
sentencing of a young mother to death by stoning is the latest example of
Sudan's random application of Islamic law
Once again, Sudan's arbitrary sharia laws are causing controversy. Last month
Intisar Sharif Abdullah, a young mother, was found guilty of adultery and
sentenced to death by stoning in Khartoum. She had given birth to a child that
was allegedly not her husband's, and both she and her 5-month-old baby are now
in Omdurman prison.
This alone, is enough to provoke outrage, but on closer inspection, it appears
that the woman in question had a poor command of the Arabic language, her
"confession" was made under duress, she was initially tried without access to a
lawyer and her brother's testimony constituted most of the evidence. The man
with whom she allegedly had committed adultery denied the allegations and was
thus set free.
This is the latest instalment in a random application of an Islamic law that
governs the country in principle, but very rarely in practice. Like many Arab
countries, Sudan has a constitution that is not purely based on sharia law, but
has some language to indicate that religious law is the basis and guiding
spirit. In effect, this is a way of paying lip service to religion for the
government to gain legitimacy, while avoiding accusations of secularism in a
conservative society.
Most importantly, it is a potent tool that allows the government to apply
punishment harshly (but inconsistently) whenever it feels the need. It also
empowers individual members of the security forces and ordinary citizens who
may be motivated by personal reasons to invoke the emotive power of religious
offence.
The result is that the threat is always there, but rarely the execution. I have
not been able to find a record of a single case of death by stoning for
adultery in the modern annals of Sudanese law, despite the fact that some
sentences were handed out.
This is a familiar pattern. Some hapless individual is caught and a zealous
judiciary, empowered by the letter of the law, passes judgment. This is then
followed by an outcry, the government defends the verdict as a sovereign right,
then "magnanimously" commutes the sentence or the courts overturn it on appeal.
In the meantime, the defendant – who in adultery cases is almost always female
– suffers incarceration, public humiliation and psychological torture. In the
case of Intisar Abdullah we see this perfect storm, exacerbated by her youth,
illiteracy, poverty, lack of advocacy or access to the media. Until this week,
there had been little to no coverage of her case in the local press.
Ironically, in its haste to apply some chastisement and its unstudied
application of religious law, the Sudanese judiciary almost always violates the
basic tenets of sharia or fabricates some tenuous connection to modern-day
"crimes".
The execution of the Islamic thinker Mahmoud Mohamed Taha in 1985 for the
absurd charge of apostasy still remains one of the most farcical miscarriages
of both religious and civil justice in the country's history.
In the Lubna Hussein case, the (eventually commuted) sentence of lashing was
for wearing trousers – an offence that not even the Qur'an or other sources of
religious law had foreseen and legislated against.
In the case of Intisar Abdullah, her lawyer told me there are at least 5 clear
legal violations of sharia law that the court committed, the most serious being
that her poor command of the Arabic language invalidated her confession. With
regard to the actual sentence, Islam outlaws the execution of nursing mothers.
Her lawyer also said that "serious crimes that have a sentence of 10 years or
more, or are punishable by death, are supposed to be limited by stricter
conditions and burdens of proof according to the penal code".
This haphazard mess of a legal system reflects a profound tension in Sudanese
society between conservative, loosely religious values, and a mainstream
resistance to the more hardcore Islamic penal law (or hudud). In conversations
with people in Khartoum this past week, all expressed a deep concern over the
stoning punishment, saying it was "alien" to Sudanese society. It is something
that almost 25 years of forcibly injecting religious rhetoric into public life
has failed to change.
Several Sudanese activists have taken her case, spreading the word and
campaigning for her release. International pressure is also rising, but within
the country itself, there is increasing concern that the legal confusion
resulting from a penal code that incorporates cherry-picked religious penalties
is claiming too many victims.
(source: The Guardian)
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