Sudan is to allow its non-Muslims to drink alcohol for the first time in decades. The country has also scrapped laws that had made leaving Islam potentially punishable by death, the justice minister said.
The raft of amendments comes one year after the toppling of Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir after mass protests against his three-decade rule.
Sudan meanwhile “allows non-Muslims to consume alcohol on the condition it doesn’t disturb the peace and they don’t do so in public,” Minister of Justice Nasredeen Abdulbari said on state television, in an interview on Saturday evening.
Though Islamic practice bars the faithful from drinking, there is a small Christian minority in Muslim-majority Sudan.
Abdulbari, part of a transitional government that took power after Bashir ‘s ouster, also declared that it would decriminalize converting from Islam to another religion.
“No one has the right to accuse any person or group of being an infidel… this threatens the safety and security of society and leads to revenge killings,” he said.
Many Muslim-majority countries apply Islamic laws making leaving the faith punishable by death.
After coming to power in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989, Bashir, who had imposed these laws, was toppled by the army following mass protests over the worsening economic crisis in the country.
Human rights organizations have frequently criticized the treatment of non-Muslims, particularly the Christian minority, by the toppled autocrats.
Copts, Catholics, Anglicans and a variety of other sects are present in the country but many of them had been forced underground by Bashir’s Islamist regime.
A Sudanese woman was sentenced to death in 2014 for converting to Christianity from Islam, causing an international uproar.
After a global effort to free her, her sentence was later quashed and she fled to the United States.