Flogging for Sudanese girl prompts protests: activists
By Mohamed Ali Saeed
KHARTOUM, Dec 22 (AFP) — A teenage girl faces a flogging after a Sudanese criminal court convicted her of having sex outside wedlock in a case that has drawn protests from human rights activists, a lawyer and activist said Monday.
A court in the Khartoum suburb of Kalakla sentenced the unmarried girl, Intisar Bakri Abdulgader, in July to 100 lashes of the whip after she became pregnant, they said. They added she was 16 years old.
The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International has already appealed to the Sudanese authorities not to carry out the sentence, according to an Amnesty statement obtained by AFP.
Intisar’s lawyer Ismail Abusugrah said his client was to have received a public flogging on Saturday, but a judge put off carrying out the punishment until January 23 after a physician recommended a delay for health reasons.
Neither the court nor prosecutors could be immediately reached for comment.
Abusugrah, speaking to AFP by telephone, said he has appealed to a higher court to reject the verdict on grounds that Intisar is a Christian, a fact the judge “seems to have failed to consider during the trial.”
Intisar, who was born in Khartoum but whose family is from southern Sudan where Muslims are a minority, said she was raised a Christian like her mother even though her father was a Muslim.
In Muslim countries, children are legally considered Muslim if their father is a Muslim, but Intassar’s relatives said the traditions of southern Sudan do not require children to follow their father’s religion.
Amnesty said in its statement that under Sudanese law, all who live in northern Sudan, whether Muslim or Christian, are bound by the penalties of the Sudanese penal code’s interpretation of religious law.
The use of religious law is a bone of contention in ongoing peace negotiations to end a 20-year civil war between the Sudanese government and rebels in the South.
Ghazi Suleiman, a prominent Sudanese human rights lawyer, vowed to take up the case after Amnesty International telephoned him to ask for more information about the case.
In her interview from home with AFP, Intisar said her mother had tried in vain to get a rickshaw driver called Isam, whom she named as the father, to marry her and sign a statement that he was the father of her child.
“Isam told the court that he did not know me and therefore has never slept with me…” Intisar said as she cradled her smiling three-month old boy.