Death penalty for rapist murder: What happens in Sudan
Dmitry Kurkin
Last Thursday a Sudanese court sentenced to death 19-year-old Noura Hussein, stabbed by her rapist husband in an attempt at self-defense. The young woman’s lawyers have about ten days left to appeal the verdict, but the prospects for the appeal are extremely vague: Badr Eldin Salah, activist of the Afrika Youth Movement, said that according to the Sharia law in Sudan, the family of the deceased could have demanded money compensation for Hussein to be executed.
The death sentence led to mass protests by human rights activists: social network users launched a campaign with the hashtag #JusticeForNoura, the UN called on Sudan to cancel the sentence, and Amnesty International criticized the court’s decision as an "act of incredible cruelty." However, the case of Noura Hussein is indicative of not even so much chilling details (according to the defendant, the man for whom she was married against her will, invited three of her relatives to hold her while he was raping her), but blatantly commonplace.
Sudan remains a country where the deprivation of rights of women and children is depressing: girls can be married forcibly from the age of ten, marital rape is not prohibited by law, and the crippling practice of so-called female circumcision is still widespread in the north of the country.
Child marriage
Nowra Hussain says that when she was sixteen, her father tried to marry her to one of her cousins. Since it was not part of the girl’s plans, she ran away and hid in the house of an unnamed relative for the next three years. She agreed to leave the shelter only after her father announced that the absentee engagement had been broken. As it turned out, it was a ploy to lure the girl out of the house: as soon as she returned home, she was forcibly married.
The main reasons for child marriages (according to the formal definition of UNICEF, anyone under the age of eighteen is considered such, although observers more often talk about marriage before the age of fifteen) in Sudan are poverty and the cult of virginity. Parents, on the one hand, are unable to support the child, on the other, they are afraid that their daughter will lose her virginity before marriage (often as a result of rape), after which she will be considered “unclean” and they will not be able to marry her. They try to conclude a marriage contract for a girl as soon as possible, especially since local laws allow it: the age of the “consent” in Sudan is a record low for African countries - only ten years old - and parents use it (in South Sudan, according to statistics, almost half of girls in age from 15 to 19 years have the status of married, with the most often marriage is already 12 years old).
After marriage, the chances of a girl to receive a secondary education, as a rule, are reduced to zero - and sometimes it is precisely for this that marriage is concluded. “My father told me that educating a girl was throwing money away. He said that marriage would make me respected in society,” said Mary K., a resident of Yambio. - Now, when I grew up, I know that this is not true. I can't get a job and support my children. "
Another consequence of child marriage is early pregnancies and related complications: as of 2013, in South Sudan, out of 100 thousand women in labor more than 2 thousand died annually - then it was the highest death rate during childbirth in the world.
Marriage as permission to rape
In April 2018, Noura Hussein was forcibly married. She refused to have sex on the wedding night, but six days later her husband raped her - this was helped by three male relatives who had immobilized Noor. The next day he tried again - and then the woman took up the knife.
In Sudan, which is inhabited predominantly by Sunni Muslims, de facto dominates the law, which understands marriage as a kind of bargain between a man and a woman: the husband undertakes to maintain and protect his wife, his wife - to obey her husband in everything. The boundaries of this submission as “marital debt” are interpreted by the interpreters of the Koran differently, but according to Sudanese notions, marital rape is not considered reprehensible. A woman’s refusal of forced sex can be a reason for divorce, but in practice it’s often not a divorce, but rape. The monstrous case of Noura Hussein is not unique in this sense: Five years ago, Human Right Watch cited evidence of another victim from South Sudan (also married to adulthood) who, being locked in a house, was abused by her husband.
Justice for Noura Hussein
The position of women in Sudan over the past hundred years has changed depending on the current regimes and the strengthening or weakening of the power of the Islamists. Although according to some researchers, the patriarchal foundations in Sudan are so strong that no regime even brought the state close to any semblance of gender equality - neither in politics, nor in the economy, nor in everyday life. The latest turn of Islamization in the late 80s actually put an end to the debate about the role of women in public life: despite the fact that in 2012 the Sudanese parliament consisted of almost a quarter of women, the real power in the country still belongs to men.
This explains the behavior of Noura Hussein’s parents, who passed her on to the police immediately after her husband’s murder, and the sentence that she had had few chances to revise, and that the angry reaction to the court’s decision mainly comes from human rights organizations from outside, and not from Sudan.
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