Raja Nicola

Raja Nicola Eissa Abdel-Masih
رجاء نيقولا عيسى عبد المسيح
Member of the Transitional Sovereignty Council
In office
11 November 2021  5 July 2022
In office
21 August 2019  25 October 2021
Personal details
BornOmdurman
Occupationjudge

Raja Nicola Eissa Abdel-Masih (Arabic: رجاء نيقولا عيسى عبد المسيح) is a civilian member of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, Sudan's collective transitional head of state. She was chosen for this position as one of six civilians to hold seats in the original 11-member council. She was the only one of them whose name was agreed upon through a consensus between the Forces of Freedom and Change alliance (FFC) and the Transitional Military Council (TMC), as was foreseen under the terms of the Draft Constitutional Declaration of August 2019. She is the only civilian member of the TSC to have been reinstated by Chairman Abdel Fattah al-Burhan after he seized power in the 2021 military coup d'état.

As such she is, along with fellow council member Aisha Musa el-Said, one of the first two women in modern Sudanese history to hold the role equivalent to a federal minister and is also the first Christian (as a member of the Coptic minority) to hold such a high political office in the country. As a judge, she is responsible in particular for the legal system in Sudan.