Sudan frees thousands
2007-08-05 21:21
Khartoum - Sudan has freed over 1 000 women and children from the south who had been jailed in Khartoum for brewing and selling alcohol, a crime under north Sudan's sharia law, said an official on Sunday.
Sudan is working to soften the impact of sharia for southerners living in the capital under a 2005 peace deal to end decades of war between the government in the Muslim north and rebels from the largely Christian and animist south.
Joshua Dau Dew, the chairperson of the commission set up to protect the rights of non-Muslims in Khartoum, said that 847
women and 158 children had been released following the
commission's request to the judiciary and chief justice.
Sharia was lifted from the semi-autonomous south under the
peace deal, but it remained in place in Khartoum. About two-million southerners live in sprawling slums surrounding the capital.
Hundreds of southern, non-Muslim women have been arrested in
Khartoum for brewing and selling alcohol to pay for food for
their children. Their husbands are either dead, separated by the
war or unable to find work.
The women often take their children with them to jail as
they have no one else to look after them.
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir last year pardoned all the
southern women in the jail, more than 90% of whom were
imprisoned for selling alcohol. But a year later, the jail was
full again.