Laying down forks for Lawal
2003-09-18 18:40
Nigeria - A human rights group in Nigeria on Thursday urged people to join a hunger strike and carry out acts of civil disobedience to protest against an Islamic court's verdict that a single mother be stoned to death for adultery.
An Islamic court in the northern city of Katsina will next week rule on whether to acquit 31-year-old single mother Amina Lawal on charges of adultery, or uphold a sentence of death by stoning.
"The Civil Rights Congress is mobilising for civil disobedience as an objection to the stoning of Amina Lawal," the group said in a press statement by its president, Shehu Sani, issued in nearby Kaduna.
"The non-violent civil objection is aimed at demonstrating opposition to her trial and possible confirmation of her death sentence," the statement said.
About 20 people have so far joined a hunger strike launched last Wednesday in Kaduna, Sani said in the statement.
This will be followed by three days of peaceful demonstrations.
Human rights activists and Nigerians based in any of the country's northern states where the strict Islamic legal code has been reintroduced are urged to take part in the demonstrations, the statement said.
Under Islamic law, also called Sharia, a person who has sex outside of marriage can be found guilty of adultery, which is punishable by death, under the legal code.
Last year Lawal was denounced by fellow villagers in the Katsina farming community of Kurami after she gave birth out of wedlock to a girl.
Lawal gave birth on January 6 of last year, more than two years after her divorce but only six-and-a-half months after Katsina formally reinstituted Sharia.
She was convicted in March last year and lost her first appeal in August 2002, instantly becoming an international cause celebrity.
Lawal's case has become an embarrassment for Nigeria's secular federal government and for President Olusegun Obasanjo, who has tried to reassure rights activists, without offending Muslims who make up 50% of the citizens of Africa's most populous nation, that the sentence will not be carried out.
No one has yet been stoned to death since 12 mainly Muslim northern states seized upon the end of military rule in 1999 to begin invoking Islamic law for the first time since Nigeria won independence in 1960.