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The
current legal system in the Sudan can only be
appraised in its historical political context.
Until the end of the first quarter of the 19th
century the Northern part of country was largely
divided into several small geographic units
which came to be governed by different rulers
which purported to apply principles of Islamic
Sharia. The South was ruled by a tribal system
based on customary law and tradition
administered by chiefs and tribal elders.
The
country first came under one unified system of
government in 1821 when it was invaded by the
Turco-Egyptian rulers in search of expansion of
their domain to exploit the natural resources of
the country and forcibly to take its men as
slaves for recruitment in the Egyptian army and
public service. The corrupt and oppressive
nature of the Turkish rule led to the
religiously motivated uprising known as the
Madhdiga, named after its leader, El Mahdi,
which adopted armed resistance throughout the
country. The Turkish rule was defeated and the
Mahdist State established in 1885. The new
regime, which ruled the country for the
following 14 years, applied a strict Islamic
system of law based on the Mahdi’s
interpretation of Islamic Sharia, applied
ruthlessly, in the absence of any other system.
In
1898, however, a joint British Egyptian army
re-conquered the country establishing the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, known as the Condominium.
For the next half century the country was
virtually under British rule. They introduced
the criminal law and criminal procedure code
from the ones then applicable in India. They
introduced a separate system of law and courts
for Islamic Sharia for all matters of personal
status, administered by Egyptian (and gradually
Sudanese) judges trained on Islamic law. |
