Horrid news out of Sudan, where a 27-year-old woman named Meriam Yehya Ibrahim has been sentenced to die for being a Christian. Amnesty International says the woman was raised as a Christian by her mother, but since her father (who left when she was 6) is a Muslim, she is considered a Muslim under Sharia law, making her Christian marriage void. That means the court is trying her as both an adulteress and an apostate, the former of which carries the penalty of a hundred lashes; the second, death. Ibrahim has been sentenced to both.
The sentence has raised a global outcry, including this statement from Amnesty International’s Sudan researcher Manar Idriss:
“The fact that a woman could be sentenced to death for her religious choice, and to flogging for being married to a man of an allegedly different religion, is abhorrent and should never be even considered …’Adultery’ and ‘apostasy’ are acts which should not be considered crimes at all, let alone meet the international standard of ‘most serious crimes’ in relation to the death penalty. It is a flagrant breach of international human rights law.”
Ibrahim is eight months pregnant, and is currently being held in custody with her 20-month-old son …
