Sudanese teenager Noura Hussein, who was sentenced to death for killing her husband after he allegedly raped her, has filed an appeal.
“Today, we filed an appeal in the appeals court against the lower court’s ruling,” her lawyer Al-Fateh Hussein told news agency AFP on Thursday. A court in Sudan found Ms Hussein guilty of “intentional murder” earlier in May after her husband’s family refused to accept financial compensation.
The plight of Ms Hussein, who is now 19, caused international outcry and sparked the campaign #JusticeforNoura.
Ms Hussein’s father forced her to marry at the age of 16 and she had tried to run away.
After being handed back to her husband by her own family, Ms Hussein alleges her husband recruited some of his cousins to hold her down as he raped her.
She stabbed him to death when he attempted to do it again the next day.
The Sharia (Islamic religious law) court sentenced her to death by hanging.
“Under Sharia law, the husband’s family can demand either monetary compensation or death,” Badr Eldin Salah, an activist from the Afrika Youth Movement who was in the court told the agency.
“They chose death and now the death penalty has been handed down.”
Yasmeen Hassan of Equality Now, one of the groups seeking to have the conviction overturned, told BBC News the verdict had not surprised her.
“Sudan is an extremely patriarchal place and gender norms are very strongly enforced,” she said.
“It is a place where girls are allowed to be married at age 10, there’s legal guardianship of men over women, women are told you have to walk a straight and narrow line and don’t transgress.
“To Noura’s credit, she is a feisty girl, she is a girl who wanted her education and wanted to do good in the world and she has been trapped in the situation and is now a victim of this system.”
