Legal Mobilization to Protect Women against Rape in Islamist Sudan

Abstract

The article explores the variety of normative and legal resources that Sudanese women inside and outside of Sudan's Islamist regime, as well as their conservative religious opponents, have mobilized to campaign for legal reform to protect women against rape. Women's rights activists and Islamist women within government institutions have largely mobilized in parallel, without much interaction and collaboration, to address the problems associated with the law's definition of rape as adultery and fornication without consent. In 2015, Sudan's National Assembly enacted an amendment to the 1991 Criminal Code with a new definition of rape, de-linking it from adultery and fornication; a process which completely excluded consultation with civil society. The reform has been poorly enforced and has come under harsh critique especially for not explicitly criminalizing marital rape.