Appeal to Sudanese courts to suspend flogging by penal law

July 31, 2009 — The status of women in the country has been largely demoted by the laws enacted and enforced since the NIF rule in 1989. Partisan decrees and legal articles indicated the demoted status of women in the civil and political life up to the extent of passing and enforcing flogging and solitary confinement, besides security harassment of poor families for economic activities such as selling tea in city streets as occurred in the capital of Gazira this last month.

The enforceable laws legitimized flogging as a crime against women’s personal dress and went as far as allowing life sentences of imprisonment or even death penalties on women accused of imparting information with opponents of the ruling regime. Women have been imprisoned, harassed, and flogged in retaliation of peaceful demonstrations by the Ramadan Martyrs’ League and other popular organizations. Above all, women were raped and killed in cold blood by government troops and militias in Darfur.

SHRO-Cairo has repeatedly asked the government to abrogate laws that violate the international norms aimed to promote the status of women and to maintain the civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights of women on equal basis. The Organization condemned strongly in the 1990s throughout the 2000s the shameless exercise of flogging women before courts by the notorious security campaigns in the shanty towns of the National Capital where thousands of displaced populations are still forced to live in dehumanizing conditions.

SHRO renews the popular national claim for the transitional authorities to suspend all articles in the Criminal Law that legalized death penalty, floggings, or imprisonment of pregnant women or mothers.

The Organization calls on the Legislative authorized committees to end the state of non-compliance of the Sudan Laws with the Bill of Rights in the Interim Constitution.

In 1997, the Judiciary exercised collective floggings of women protesting the government’s killings of students and other young men in the civil war. Most recently, journalist Lubna Ahmed Hussain has been put to a trial that carried with it the threat of flogging.

We support in the strongest terms possible the national appeal for the Sudanese courts to put a permanent freeze on the use of flogging as a legal penalty in Sudanese courts toward a legislative decree to abrogate the law all together by the competent authorities.