Hopeful Amina awaits appeal
2003-09-23 08:57
Kano, Nigeria - Nigerian mother-of-four Amina Lawal will return to face a panel of Islamic judges on Thursday, hoping to be cleared of a sentence that she be stoned to death for committing adultery.
The 31-year-old housewife was convicted in March last year after giving birth out of wedlock and risks becoming the first Nigerian to be stoned in the three years since 12 northern states brought back Shari'ah law.
But as the Shari'ah Appeal Court in the northern city of Katsina prepared for Thursday's hearing, when it has promised a verdict in her second appeal against the conviction, her supporters were confident of victory.
"I think we've done our homework well. I think we'll get a good outcome," Ezinne Ndidi Ekekwe, a Nigerian lawyer and activist for the women's rights group Baobab, said on Monday.
If the defence team's optimism proves founded, and the Katsina court accepts their argument that Lawal's conviction was unfair, an acquittal will be a great relief to Nigeria's secular federal government.
Global sympathy
Lawal's plight has won her support and sympathy from around the world and embarrassed a multi-ethnic, religiously-mixed government desperate to rehabilitate their country's battered human rights reputation.
Candle-lit vigils have been held in front of Nigerian embassies in Europe and co-ordinated campaigns of e-mail and letter writing have upped the pressure on President Olusegun Obasanjo to intervene.
So far, however, the Christian leader has not challenged Shari'ah directly for fear of offending Nigeria's approximately 63 million Muslims, half the population of Africa's most populous country.
Instead he has put his faith in the appeals process to clear Lawal, who has become the most famous symbol of the controversy, and made only vague promises to the international media that her rights will be respected.
Won't go away
But observers warn that the issue won't go away.
Another young mother and her ex-lover, Fatima Usman and Ahmadu Ibrahim of Niger State, have been sentenced to be stoned to death and are awaiting a chance to mount their own appeals.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen alleged thieves are waiting in northern jails for state governors to sign orders that their hands be chopped off, in line with another of the Shari'ah's uncompromising penalties.
Anger is also rising among Nigeria's Christians and rights activists from both communities over what they see as Obasanjo's failure to defend Nigeria's secular constitution.
"Government seems to have abdicated its responsibility in this way, by asking aggrieved Nigerians to go to court to fight for their rights," said Nwachukwu Ike, a senior lawyer for the Civil Liberties Organisation.
"The constitution of Nigeria is supreme in legal matters. Extending the jurisdiction of Shari'ah to cover criminal matters is unconstitutional," he said on Monday.
The 1999 constitution, under which Nigeria emerged from military rule, gave the 36 states of the federation broad leeway to pass their own laws, providing they do not conflict with the founding document itself.
Since it was passed, the 12 mainly-Muslim states north of the Niger and Benue rivers have each passed some version of Islamic law into their penal codes, the first time Shari'ah has held sway since independence in 1960.
Creeping Islamisation
The return of Shari'ah triggered sectarian riots in several cities, leaving hundreds dead in clashes between Christians and Muslims, and exacerbating north-south ethnic tensions.
The fighting has died down, although it flared again in November last year during controversy over the Miss World beauty pageant, but Christians still fear what they regard as Nigeria's creeping Islamisation.
Last week a northern human rights group, representing many moderate Muslims, called for a hunger strike to protest against Lawal's sentence.
Meanwhile, many Muslim imams have hit out at what they say is the piecemeal and insincere application of Shari'ah by the northern state governments, and have urged a tougher line.
Lawal was denounced by fellow villagers in the Katsina State farming community of Kurami after she gave birth to a daughter, Wasila, more than two years after splitting from her husband.
At last month's appeal hearing defence counsel Aliyu Musa Yawuri argued that the village court which convicted her had not properly explained the offence nor its consequences before Lawal's alleged confession.
He also said Wasila had been conceived before Shari'ah formally came into force in Katsina and that, under Islamic law, the birth could in any case have come from a "sleeping embryo" fertilised during her marriage.