Various United Nations agencies and rights groups continue to urge the government of Sudan to provide leniency for a woman jailed to death sentence for stabbing her husband to death.
This follows after the husband tried to rape her.
The 19-year-old Noura Hussein, forced into marriage by her family at the age of 16, faces death by hanging after a sharia court found her guilty of premeditated murder for stabbing her husband.
Former South African Deputy President and also UN Women’s Executive Director, Dr Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka has also weighed in.
“We want to make sure that this girl does not die, that she is released… because this is a child who was forced to marry against her will,” Ngcuka said.
Ngcuka appealed to her parents, “she was sent back to the same man that she was running away from, and all she ever wanted was to be a school teacher.”
The Sudanese Government is a partner with South Africa in fighting violence against women.
“Last year during the 16 days of activism we were working with them [Sudanese], we are calling on them to honour the promises that we’ve made together to the girls of the world. UNFPA, Unicef, ourselves, many NGOs have shown that it is horrible to force children to marry as early as 16, some of them at the age of 10, it just kills the nation, it kills the girl, it is a violation of their rights,” the former Deputy President said.
