Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman who was sentenced to death for refusing to give up her Christian faith, when she was eight months pregnant, has given birth to a little girl, her lawyers told The Telegraph.
The 27-year-old mother of two now, gave birth to her second child in prison as she was not granted permission to be admitted to hospital.
Her son Martin who is not yet two years old has been living with her in the same prison cell.
Meriam was arrested in February and was sentenced to death by hanging a few weeks ago for allegedly rejecting the Muslim faith. This is how a judge decided to punish her crime of apostasy. Meriam was accused of abandoning the faith because her father was Muslim and sentenced to a hundred lashings for adultery because she married a Christian man. Under Sharia law, her marriage is not valid.
The judge asked her to give up her faith: "We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged to death," Abbas Mohammed Al-Khalifa said, addressing the woman with her Muslim name: Adraf Al-Hadi Mohammed Abdullah. The young woman betrayed no emotion when the sentence was read out. Shortly before this, an imam had spoken with her in a caged dock for about 30 minutes. At the end, Meriam calmly told the judge: "I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy."
The human rights organization Christian Solidarity Worldwide says Meriam’s father is a Sudanese Muslim and her mother an Ethiopian Orthodox woman. She was abandoned by her father when she was just six years old and was brought up in the Christian faith. But because her father is Muslim, she is also considered to be so under Sudanese law. This means that her marriage to a non-Muslim would be considered null.
Last week, her husband, Daniel Wani, spoke out against the conditions in which the woman was forced to live in prison, despite her pregnancy.
The law says Meriam Ibrahim can breastfeed for two years before her death sentence is carried out.
Amnesty International said it is deplorable that a woman should be sentenced to death on the basis of her religious faith or whipped because she is married to a man who has a different religious faith.
Some Western embassies in Khartoum have appealed for Meriam’s release. “We call upon the government of Sudan to respect the right to freedom of religion, including one’s right to change one’s faith or beliefs, to respect the right to freedom of religion, including one's right to change one's faith or beliefs, a universal human right enshrined in Sudan’s own 2005 Interim Constitution,” a statement issued by the US, British, Canadian and Dutch embassies reads.
The hope is that there will be a retrial, since “the local judge applied Sharia law without taking national law into consideration,” the President of the association Italians for Darfur, Antonella Napoli, said. Mrs. Napoli has been working in the human rights field in African countries for many years. She gathered 25 thousand signatures for Meriam’s release and sent the petition to the embassy in Sudan. “Meriam, the Christian woman sentenced to death for apostasy Sudan has given birth to a girl. They are both well. Unfortunately they were not able to leave the prison in Khartoum,” Mrs. Napoli tweeted. But the little girl’s birth “brings hope”, Mrs. Napoli added.
Meriam “will be given a new trial” that excludes the death penalty, some lawyers told Khalid Omer Yousif of Sudan Change
Now, a local NGO.
On Thursday, Meriam’s lawyers filed an appeal at the Appeal Court of Bahri and Shaq Al Nil; if the appeal is unsuccessful, they are planning to take the case to Sudan’s Supreme Court and Constitutional Court.
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/world-news/detail/articolo/sudan-34381/
Topic: Update on Meriam (Read 3897 times)