The verdict on Gillian Gibbons looks like something of a fudge. Before Friday prayers the Sudanese Government can tell protesters that the schoolteacher has been found guilty and punished, and will be deported within two weeks.

On the other hand, it has avoided the anger of Britain and the international community had the court ordered a flogging or other harsher punishment.

From Britain’s point of view, the sentence is hardly welcome: someone has been locked up for a fortnight for a misunderstanding over a teddy bear. But the outcome will spare Britain from trying to put pressure on Sudan, knowing that it had few ways of doing so.

Ms Gibbons’s plight is a reminder that there is often not much that Britain can do to protect its citizens in a foreign country, particularly one with which it now has few ties.

Britain’s tactics had been to try to take the heat out of the row, although this was becoming difficult after public protests began in Khartoum. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, who summoned the Sudanese Ambassador yesterday to protest about Ms Gibbons’s predicament, said: “It is right that the UK Government and society make clear our concerns. It is not about lack of respect for Islam, or Sudan, but about an innocent misunderstanding.” He added that this was “not a political dispute” and maintained that Britain was not considering how to put pressure on Sudan through threats to cut off aid or through sanctions. The determination to put that face on the row is understandable, not least because of Sudanese sensitivity about being told what to do by the former colonial ruler. However, Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials had spent the previous day in hours of meetings analysing exactly that point: what sources of pressure Britain might use.

The anser is not many. The lack of influence of the outside world on Sudan has been amply illustrated by other countries’ failure in persuading it to quell violence there, either the civil war or the killing in Darfur. The Sudanese Government has resisted moves to deploy peacekeepers of the African Union and UN in Darfur, where more than 200,000 have died, and has shrugged off Security Council warrants against a government official and a militia leader.

The council has regularly considered sanctions, as has the US. This year President Bush outlined possible measures, including the barring of 29 companies owned or controlled by the Sudanese Government from the US financial system, making it a crime for US companies to deal with them. The US could also impose travel bans on government officials.

Similar sanctions are available to Britain, but more limited, given its slimmer commercial links, although British companies have supplied equipment for Sudan’s oil industry.

The statements by British Muslim groups condemning the charges against Ms Gibbons should have been helpful in distancing the case from accusations of an insult to Islam. But as the protests in Khartoum show, once that perception has taken hold it is hard to dispel. Yesterday’s judgment seems designed to give a nod to British reproof but also to appease the street.

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