Sudanese Islamist Justice

"They didn't even take Meriam to a hospital -- she just delivered inside a prison clinic. But neither her husband nor I have been allowed to see them yet."
Elshareef Ali Elshareef Mohammed, lawyer for Miriam Ibrahim

"If they want to execute me, then they should go ahead and do it because I'm not going to change my faith. I refuse to change. I am not giving up Christianity just so that I can live. I know I could stay alive by becoming a Muslim and I would be able to look after our family, but I need to be true to myself."
Miriam Ibrahim, 27-year-old Sudanese Christian doctor

Meriam Ibrahim and husband Daniel Wani

"Apostasy and adultery should not even be crimes. It's a personal choice who to marry and what to believe."
"The human rights situation has been deteriorating for the past few years. It's an extremely repressive regime, with opposition activists tortured and the targeting of anyone who dares to defy the regime."
Manar Idriss, Sudan researcher, Amnesty International

Of course Sudan is a repressive regime. One only has to look at the mass atrocities that took place in Darfur, with the Arab Sudanese government dispatching attack helicopters and Janjaweed terrorists to slaughter black Sudanese Muslims who rebelled against a government that increasingly marginalized and oppressed them. Hundreds of thousands of Darfurians were displaced, tens of thousands of women were raped, thousands killed.
Picture Credit: interet-general.inf
The International Criminal Court in 2005 undertook an official investigation concluding with the issuance of an international warrant for the arrest of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity, stopping short of charging him with genocide. The African Union, on the other hand, passed a resolution that members not turn over al-Bashir to the ICC. And nor did the Arab League feel compelled to other than congratulate him on his excellent administration.

That a Sudanese woman has been sentenced to hang for refusing to renounce her devotion to Christianity, a religion she grew up with, simply affirms the country's fanatical Islamist fundamentalist credentials. Meriam Ibrahim, who married Daniel Wani, a a biochemist and fellow Christian, has been charged with apostasy. Her mother was Christian, her father Muslim, a man who abandoned his family when Meriam was a child, leaving her mother to bring her up a Christian.

She was charged with apostasy at the urging of her husband's family, and ordered to return to Islam, which she refused, for to do so would also force her to dissolve her marriage to a Christian. Her 20-month-old son has lived with his mother inside the prison since she was charged and imprisoned in February, and where she has been shackled by the ankles, impeding her movement, despite that she was heavily pregnant.

Martin, above, is pictured with his father on a visit. His family claim he is American because his father has been granted U.S. citizenship. He is being held with Meriam because the authorities claim he is a Muslim and will not release him into the care of a Christian

Now she has given birth, inside the prison, to a little girl. She will be permitted, charitably, to nurse her baby for two years. When the infant is weaned, her mother is to be hanged for the cardinal sin of abjuring Islam for Christianity, a hanging criminal offence. This is Islamic justice. Amnesty International has launched a petition on her behalf, to have her freed, one signed by 660,000 people worldwide. Unfortunately they have been banned from Sudan since 2005, unsurprisingly.

Father Daniel Wani, a U.S. citizen from Manchester, New Hampshire, holds Maya for the first time after being allowed to visit his wife, Meriam Ibrahim, who was sentenced to death for marrying him, a Christian

Her lawyers, filing an appeal, hope to take her case to Sudan's Supreme Court and Constitutional Court. Apostasy is defined in Sudan as the renouncing of your religion. Considered a crime of the highest order, based on a Hadith from the Prophet Mohammad, who stated: "Whoever changes his religion kill  him."