The British Foreign Secretary has condemned the sentencing of a pregnant Sudanese woman to death for marrying a Christian man and refusing to convert to Islam.
Meriam Yahia Ibrhim Ishag, who is currently 8 months pregnant with her second child (the first of whom has been in prison along side her) was sentenced to death last Wednesday for apostasy, the renunciation of Islam. The 27-year-old doctor, who has been married to US citizen Daniel Wani, insists that she was never a Muslim to begin with and although she was born to Muslim father, who left when she was 6-years-old, she was in fact raised by her Christian mother, who was originally from Ethopia.
Her marriage in 2012 had been marked as invalid by the government, and Meriam has consequently been sentenced to 100 lashings for committing adultery. She was sentenced under Islamic Sharia law, which was amended in 1991 to make apostasy punishable by death. Her brother filed the case against her.
Her husband, who is disabled and in a wheelchair, returned to Sudan in order to help his wife, but until very recently was banned from seeing her and their 20-month-old son. The court has said that the execution will not take place until Meriam has given birth.
Bukhari Afandi, the Chargé d’Affaires at the Sudanese Embassy in the UK, was summoned to the Foreign Office on May 19th by the Foreign Minister. There he met with political director Simon Gass, who expressed his concern over Meriam’s sentence and asked him to implore the Sudanese government to “uphold its international obligations on freedom of religion or belief, and to do all it can to get this decision overturned”. Mark Simmons, the UK minister for Africa, also described the sentencing as “barbaric”.
There is still time to appeal the decision. An online petition, which has already been signed by over 140,000 people, has been set up at http://beheardproject.com/meriam to demand that the Sudanese government releases Meriam.
