Oprah Joins Fight To Help Woman Sentenced To Stoning-Nigerian President
Says Divorced Mother Can Appeal

Oprah is the latest well-known American to take up the cause of a
31-year-old Nigerian mother who is sentenced to death by stoning.

Amina Lawal Kurami is being punished for having sex out of wedlock. She
reportedly bore a baby girl more than 9 months after her divorce.

The man named as the father of the baby reportedly denied having sex with
her, and his confession was enough for the charges against him to be
discontinued, according to Amnesty International.

According to the law in Kurami's country, she will be buried up to her
neck in sand, and people will be allowed to throw stones at her head
until she is dead. Kurami's execution is scheduled to take place as soon
as she finishes breastfeeding her baby.

However, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said Tuesday, in a radio
and television broadcast marking Nigeria's 42nd independence anniversary,
that Kurami can launch an appeal.

"We fully understand the concerns of Nigerians and friends of Nigeria,
but we cannot imagine or envision a Nigerian being stoned to death,"
Obasanjo said. "It has never happened. And may it never happen."

Oprah is now joining the fight for Kurami's life, and former President
Bill Clinton spoke out against the sentence last month. Oprah will
highlight the issue on her show Friday.

Amnesty International has also launched a campaign to help Kurami.

"We are doing what everyone else all over the world is doing, and what
Amnesty International has built its foundation on -- writing letters in
mass quantities," said Angie Hougas, Wisconsin's AI area coordinator. "If
you go to the AI Web site, folks can click on a link on Aminal Lawal with
a pre-written letter. They can send it electronically or they can print
it and fax or mail it themselves."

(source: Associated Press)

2 more countries in the Miss World contest to be held in Nigeria in November, France and Belgium, have announced they are pulling out of the contest and like the others, in protest against a Sharia death sentence passed on a woman, Ms Amina Lawal, convicted of adultery.

This is as the organiser of the Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria pageant, Silver Bird Promotions has stepped up appeals urging countries with an intention to boycott to rescind their decision.

"The Miss France committee is joining the protests against Nigeria, which condemns women to death for adultery. These sentences are barbaric and unacceptable," said Genevieve de Fontenay, head of the Miss France committee.

Miss France has missed the last two Miss World competitions because of a dispute between committees, but the current holder Sylvie Tellier was due to take part this year.

According to de Fontenay, "if the competition were moved to another country we would revise our decision."

"I have decided not to take part if Amina Lawal is not freed," Miss Belgium, Ann van Elsen, told Le Soir newspaper.

Already, other countries have taken the boycott decision. They include:

IVORY COAST
 

"If I'm chosen for this competition, I'm not going to Nigeria, and I hope my decision will help save Amina Lawal," Yannick Azebian, Miss Ivory Coast, said.

NORWAY
 

Geir Hamnes, manager of Miss Norway, Kathrine Soerland, said that if the Supreme Court does not invalidate Lawal's sentence she will not attend.

Nigeria's Supreme Court will not be able to consider a verdict in the case until it has gone through 2 lower courts and is unlikely to pronounce before the event.

KENYA
 

Kenya's Miss World national coordinator, Leakey Odera said: "There is no point sending our participant to Nigeria if Lawal is executed, because the world would think we are backing the inequitable executions by the Islamic courts."

UNDECIDED:
 

NETHERLANDS
 

Hans Koenings, a spokesman for the Miss Netherlands organisation, said: "It is up to the Miss World organisation to decide if they want to take the event to such a country.

"I would imagine they would want to take a long hard look at the situation."

GERMANY
 

Miss Germany runner up and Miss World nominee Simone Wulf-Reinfurt, 20, is concerned about the location of the event.

"If half of the women threaten not to go, the organisers should do something," she said.

FINLAND
 

Finland has yet to select a 2002 beauty queen, but a number of high-ranking women politicians have already urged that wins through to boycott the Nigerian event.

DENMARK
 

Miss Denmark, Masja Juel, has expressed concerns over the verdict and is said to be closely watching the responses of the other contestants. Her sponsors said she would decide on Monday.

TOGO
 

Miss Togo, Sandrine Agbopke, is unsure of participating. She said: "Stoning this woman is not right. The authorities and all of society should rise up to end this sort of practice."

BULGARIA
 

The Bulgarian Miss World committee did not wish to comment on a possible boycott. Miss Bulgaria, Teodora Bourgazlieva, might in any case be banned for having posed for nude photographs.

POLAND
 

The president of the Miss Poland organising committee said the Polish contestant would be chosen on October 12 and would decide herself whether to go to Nigeria.

CONFIRMED ATTENDANCE:
 

AUSTRIA
 

Emil Bauer, head of the Austrian Miss World committee, said: "Miss Austria very much wants to take part. I could block her decision, but I don't want to hurt her career.

"Personally I'm against going, I don't want to put a foot in that country," he said.

SWEDEN
 

Sophia Hedmark, Miss Sweden runner up and Miss World contender, has said: "The ruling ... violates human rights but there is nothing to be gained by not going to Nigeria."

A spokeswoman for the Swedish TV company sponsoring the event said she was under contract to attend.

CZECH REPUBLIC
 

Katerina Smrzova, runner-up in Miss Czech Republic 2002, will attend, according to event organisers Art Production K2 who did not wish to comment on the judgement.

RUSSIA
 

Miss Russia, Anna Tatarintseva, will compete in Nigeria, the director of her national pageant said.

"There is injustice and crime everywhere in the world. In Russia, how many cases of injustice to women could we cite?" said Tatiana Andreieva.

THAILAND
 

Thai television channel BVEC Tero said that it had 200 contestants competing to become Miss Thailand and that the winner would go to Nigeria.

HUNGARY
 

Miss Hungary Renata Rozs, is going to Nigeria, the owner of the Miss World Hungary company that organises the contest, Marika Fasy, said.

SPAIN
 

Miss Spain, Lola Alcocer, plans to go to Nigeria, her press service said.

INDIA
 

Satya Saran, the editor of the magazine Femina which selected Miss India said: "At the moment we have no plans of pulling Shruti Sharm out of the Miss World competition in Nigeria."

Amina Lawal, 30, is due to be stoned to death after weaning her child. In August, a Sharia court of Appeal rejected her appeal.  The Miss World Contest will be held in Nigeria this year after Nigeria's
Agbani Darego became the 1st black African woman to be crowned Miss World in 2001.

Another threat to the Miss World pageant is attack on the contest by militant Islamic groups in Nigeria, which call it a "parade of nudity" bound to promote promiscuity and HIV/Aids.

A similar sentence passed on another woman, Safiya Husaini, had been overturned on appeal just as Ms Lawal was being convicted earlier this year after a vigorous campaign by international human rights groups.

Meanwhile, an international human rights body yesterday slammed the harsh sentences imposed under Islamic law in some Nigerian states and said they violated global standards.

The Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) said "these sentences are inconsistent with international human rights standards, including the African Charter on Human and People's Rights and the Nigerian constitution."

An FIDH team had just completed a weeklong fact-finding mission in Nigeria on the heels of the Islamic appeal court's decision to confirm a sentence of death by stoning on Lawal.

The case of 30-year-old Lawal, which will go to a 2nd appeal, has drawn worldwide condemnation and embarrassed the Federal Government, which opposes the use of Sharia in civil cases but says it is powerless to halt it.

The FIDH's mission was carried out with Nigeria's largest rights group, the Civil Liberties Organisation.

The groups toured Abuja, Kaduna, Lagos and Zamfara states and delegates met with top government officials and representatives of non-governmental organisations as well as civil society organisations.

The report expressed serious doubt over the technical capacity of jurists who preside in Sharia courts.

Under the code, 1st reintroduced in January 2000 in northwestern Zamfara State, some offenders have already been amputated, flogged, jailed or fined.

(source: This Day)

Organizers of Miss World asked Nigeria's government Thursday for assurances a single mother's sentence of death by stoning for having sex outside of marriage will not be carried out.

The pageant is to be held Nov. 30 in Nigeria's capital Abuja, and organizers have come under fire from beauty queens, who are threatening to boycott to protest the stoning sentence, and from Nigeria's Muslims, who are opposed to an event they see as immoral.

Miss World president Julia Morley canceled an inspection tour of contestant visiting sites in eastern Nigeria to meet with government ministers about the case of single mother Amina Lawal, said Guy
Murray-Bruce, owner of the pageant's Nigerian franchise rights.

"We are appalled that such an action might take place," Morley said in a statement. "This is a situation that we have never come across before."

She said organizers were monitoring Lawal's case and "are confident justice will prevail."

An Islamic court last month sentenced Lawal to death by stoning for having sex outside of marriage. The 30-year-old gave birth to a daughter more than nine months after divorcing her husband. The sentence is
scheduled to be carried out in 2004, after she finishes weaning the baby.

The sentence sparked an international outcry. The European Parliament's committee on women's rights on Wednesday unanimously approved a motion calling for a boycott of the pageant to protest the sentence.

Participants from France and Belgium have already announced their withdrawal from the pageant.

"They discussed the Shariah (Islamic law) issue," Murray-Bruce said after Morley met with Abba Gana, the minister responsible for Abuja. "She is asking people in authority to reassure everybody nothing will happen."

Muslim groups have also threatened to disrupt the pageant, which they say is immoral and should not be held in Nigeria during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Nigeria has sub-Saharan Africa's largest Muslim population.

Lawal is the 2nd Nigerian woman to be condemned to death for having sex out of wedlock. The 1st woman, Safiya Hussaini, had her sentence overturned in March on appeal.

(source: Associated Press)

An appeal hearing is due to open in northern Nigeria on Monday for a woman convicted of
adultery and sentenced to death by stoning under controversial Sharia, or Islamic, laws.

This is the second such case to come before the Sharia court of appeal.

The previous conviction was overturned earlier this year after intense international pressure
from human rights groups.

Despite the Nigerian federal government declaring such strict Sharia punishments unconstitutional,
the country's northern states appear determined to enforce these laws.

Amina Lawal now has an eight-month old baby daughter.

The existence of this child, born to a divorcee, was evidence enough to convict her of the
crime of adultery.

At her appeal being funded by human rights groups, she is expected to claim that the father of the child is her former husband, using the defence allowable under Islamic law that the foetus lay dormant in her womb since the divorce two years ago.

Human rights campaigners say that the punishment is not only inhumane but severely
discriminates against women.

To convict a man of the same crime he must either confess directly to the court, or no less
than four men have to attest to witnessing the physical act of adultery.

                                           Religious split

If there is one issue that threatens to divide this country more than any other it is the
implementation of these strict Islamic laws in the majority Muslim northern states.

Although the punishment only applies to Muslims, Christians in the north feel threatened
and tensions between the two communities have led to major outbreaks of inter-religious
violence over the past three years.

The federal government has declared such Sharia punishments unconstitutional but,
in direct defiance of this, northern leaders have pressed ahead, resisting what they describe
as "undue pressure" from non-Muslims in the Nigerian Government.

If Amina Lawal loses her appeal this time, she can take her case all the way to the Supreme
Court in Abuja.

Only then would the debate come to a head and the constitutionality of the strict Sharia
punishments really be tested.

                 LONDON, England -- Human rights pressure group Amnesty International
                 has issued an "urgent appeal" to Nigeria to free a woman sentenced to death
                 after she confessed to having a child out of marriage.

                 Amina Lawal, 30, who faces execution by stoning, was convicted and sentenced
                 by an Islamic sharia court in March after giving birth to a baby girl more than nine
                 months after divorcing.

                 Pregnancy outside marriage constitutes sufficient evidence for a woman to be
                 convicted of adultery according to some Northern Nigerian states that apply strict
                 sharia law.

                 On Tuesday, an appeals court in Funtua stayed her execution for two years to
                 allow her to wean her baby.

                 "The ruling means that nothing will happen to Amina regarding the execution of the
                  death sentence on her until she has weaned her baby by 2004," Kurami's lawyer
                  Hawa Ibrahim told Reuters.

                 But Amnesty International is urging the Nigerian government to ensure that she
                 is not executed under any circumstance.

                 It is urging the public to send faxes of protest Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo,
                 Alhaji Sule Lamido, its minister of foreign affairs, and Kanu Godwin Agabi, the minister
                 of justice.

                 In a statement, the pressure group said: "Amnesty International is deeply concerned
                 for the physical and psychological integrity of Amina Lawal and unreservedly
                 condemns the use of corporal punishment, torture and the use of the death penalty,
                 which clearly violates international human rights standards.

                 "Amnesty International would like to recall that the government of Nigeria is a state
                 party to international human rights instruments which include the Convention
                 against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
                 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

                 "In addition, Nigeria is a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
                 Discrimination Against Women which prohibits violence and other forms of
                 discrimination against women."

                 It is calling on the public contact the Nigerian authorities and urge them to
                 "guarantee the physical and psychological integrity of Ms. Amina Lawal and her
                 family, take all necessary measures to secure respect for the rule of law in Nigeria
                 which includes respect for the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman and
                 degrading treatment and punishment, such as the practice of corporal punishment
                 and guarantee women their human rights.

                 "It also urges calls on the public to "strongly condemn the sentencing to death of a
                 woman who has just had a child."

                 Kurami is the second woman to be sentenced to death after bearing a child out of
                 marriage since 2000, when more than a dozen states in the predominantly Muslim
                 northern Nigeria adopted strict Islamic sharia law.

                 In March, an appeals court reversed a similar sentence on Safiya Hussaini
                 Tungar-Tudu after worldwide pleas for clemency and a warning from Obasanjo
                 that Nigeria faced international isolation over the case.

                 The adoption of sharia, which punishes theft with the amputation of hands, has
                 stoked violence between Muslims and Christians in Africa's most populous state.
                 More than 3,000 people have been killed.

                            From: http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/africa/06/05/nigeria.amnesty/index.html

                 ‘One thing I cannot accept is to die alone when I know - and the alkali [Sharia
                 law judge] knows - I could not have made this baby alone. I mean I am not the
                 Virgin Mary!

                 "Brilliant, aren’t they, these men? They stick to a law inherited from the seventh
                 century for people having sex in the open Arabian desert or makeshift tents, but
                 in the 21st century they can impregnate us in Hilton Hotel rooms with air
                 conditioning and then deny us."

                 So spoke Safiya Hussaini Tungar Tudu following her sentence to death by
                 stoning after being convicted of adultery by an Islamic Sharia court in a
                 predominantly Muslim area in northern Nigeria. The judge who convicted her
                 decreed that 35-year-old Safiya will be buried up to her neck in a pit and then
                 men - only men - will begin hurling rocks at her head until she is dead.

                 The attorney general of Sokoto state, Aliyu Abubakar Sanyinna, says of Safiya’s
                 sentence: "It is the law of Allah. We are just complying with the laws of Allah, so
                 we don’t have anything to worry about."

                 How big will the executioners’ stones be? "It could be something like this,"
                 replies the attorney general, holding up his fist.

                 If Safiya becomes the first Nigerian executed for adultery, the case could be as
                 damaging for Nigeria as the hanging of the environmental campaigner Ken
                 Saro-Wiwa was to the country’s former military dictatorship. Meanwhile in Europe,
                 and among Nigerian feminist activists, there is growing outrage at the sentence
                 handed down against Safiya last October in the dust-shrouded city of Sokoto on
                 the edge of the Sahara.

                 On 14 January, five Sharia appeal judges adjourned the hearing of Safiya’s
                 entreaty against her own execution until 18 March. Safiya sat quietly
                 breastfeeding her eleven-month-old daughter Adama in the court as the judges
                 pondered her fate. Human rights activists, women’s groups and about a dozen
                 defence lawyers were also in the courtroom. The judges claimed they needed
                 more time to consider five new grounds of appeal brought by Safiya’s defence
                 team.

                 Safiya was unimpressed. "Only I will be punished, because the injustice of the
                 law is that men are not punished for impregnating women," she says. "I insist
                 that my crime is not adultery, but pregnancy. Since only women can be pregnant
                 this means that the real crime is being a woman. The man will always commit
                 adultery and escape. The woman is the only one who can ever conceive, the
                 unknowing depository of the traitor’s semen."

                 The above is the outline of the terrible fate of mother-of-five Safiya Hussaini
                 Tungar Tudu. Born the fifth of 12 children to an illiterate herbal doctor father in
                 the remote and poverty-stricken village of Tungar Tudu in northern Nigeria’s
                 semi-desert, Safiya was married off at the age of 12, thus beginning the harsh
                 and difficult life of a typical northern Nigerian wife. Her marriage, and two
                 subsequent marriages, did not last, as is so often the case in the region’s
                 particular culture of Islam. Divorced by her third husband in 1998, she began
                 receiving the attention of another man who, she alleged, raped her.

                 Meanwhile, full Sharia law was established in Sokoto in June 2000, a month after
                 baby Adama was conceived. According to the interpretation of Islamic law by
                 Sokoto’s judges, Safiya, as a woman who has been married, is an adulteress for
                 conceiving a child outside marriage. For that, the penalty is death by stoning. If
                 Safiya had never been married, she would have been charged with the lesser
                 offence of fornication, for which the punishment is 100 lashes.

                 The Sokoto judgment has been fiercely criticised in the largely Christian and
                 animist southern Nigeria, and by some Muslim theologians who question
                 whether stoning adulteresses was ever sanctioned in the Koran.

                 As Safiya received no education as a child, spending her early years fetching
                 water and herbs for her father, she speaks hardly any English, only her native
                 Hausa, and has difficulty understanding the complex arguments swirling around
                 her. These are the factors that prompted Nigerian satirist, Sanusi Lamido, to
                 take up her cause by publishing The Adulteress’ Diary in Safiya’s name. It is a
                 controversial piece, which savages the Sharia lawmakers, accusing them of gross
                 hypocrisy and questioning their interpretation of the Koran. Thus, the quotes at
                 the head of this article are Safiya à la Lamido. Now confined, on bail, to her
                 blind father’s mud hut, Safiya has made only limited statements herself since
                 her ordeal began.

                 Lamido is not the only person to pour scorn on the
                 mullahs. Delphine Nobime, a Christian studying at a
                 polytechnic in Zamfara, another northern state
                 whose governor, Ahmed Sani, has introduced full
                 Sharia law, says: "The Moslem leaders preach
                 Sharia during the day and run after us girls on
                 campus at night. They are the champions in
                 drinking."

                 Emmanuella Onorah, a southerner serving with the
                 army in Zamfara, says: "Sharia only really exists for
                 the poor. It’s easy to cut off the hand of some
                 unfortunate guy who steals a chicken or to flog a
                 woman who has sex. But no-one asks what actually goes on behind the tinted
                 windows of the Mercedes owned by government officials or religious leaders."

                 Safiya’s plight has assumed extraordinary importance because, less than three
                 years after ending dictatorship, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is
                 struggling with waves of religious and ethnic killings that threaten its new
                 democratic system and the country’s unity. A series of Muslim -Christian
                 atrocities and inter-tribal clashes have brought the number of people killed to
                 nearly 8,000 since 1998 - following the death of the dictator, General Sani
                 Abacha, himself a Muslim , allegedly in the arms of two Indian prostitutes.

                 The election in 1999 of a civilian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, and of a
                 democratic federal parliament raised Nigerians’ hopes of a better future. Under
                 Abacha and previous military dictators, the Nigerian people had grown poorer
                 despite massive oil wealth. Nigeria has earned more than £200 billion from oil
                 exports since it was first discovered in the late 1950s. But its people are worse
                 off now than they were 30 years ago, when it seemed that the 1970s oil boom
                 would make Nigerians rich beyond their dreams.

                 Instead, at least half of Nigeria’s 120 million citizens live in abject poverty
                 without access to clean water. The literacy rate is below that of the Congo, long
                 thought of as one of Africa’s poorest areas. The World Bank ranks Nigeria as the
                 13th poorest country in the world. Its foreign debt stands at more than £22.

                 Added to this, the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International calls
                 Nigeria the most corrupt nation on earth. One of its workers, Bilikisu Yusuf, says
                 corruption pervades Nigerian society so deeply that it has reached "the degree
                 of insanity".

                 The country’s rulers, especially past military dictators who ruled for 30 of the 40
                 years since Nigeria became independent from Britain, have diverted most of the
                 oil wealth into a limited number of private pockets. Leaders have plundered the
                 country, sucking out billions of dollars and stashing them in western banks.

                 Having survived six successful military coups, four failed coups, and a civil war
                 from 1967 to 1970 that claimed a million lives, Nigerians now stand at a new
                 crossroads. Civil war again threatens and there is a possibility of the break-up of
                 a country created by Britain in 1914 from more than 250 tribes speaking 200
                 languages.

                 Above all, it is the Muslim-Christian clash (accentuated by America’s and
                 Britain’s war against the Taleban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan) that
                 could plunge Nigeria into terminal chaos. Bin Laden has acquired cult status
                 among Nigeria’s Muslims: portraits of the al-Qaeda leader have been selling
                 well. But in reality trouble was brewing long before Bin Laden became an issue.
                 Since the end of military dictatorship, President Obasanjo has come under huge
                 pressure from northern militants who want to implement full Sharia law.

                 A mild form of Sharia, confined solely to civil courts and only for those who
                 wanted it, was practised in the north under British imperial rule. The British
                 allowed the traditional sultans and emirs to run their provinces according to their
                 own rules, as long as they imposed none of the crueller Sharia punishments
                 such as amputation. The system, it was thought, was cheap and required few
                 colonial officers to administer it.

                 But the new Sharia laws being implemented in 12 northern Nigerian states are
                 harsher and often compulsory for both Muslims and non-Muslims. They outlaw
                 sex before marriage, and alcohol. They bar women from many jobs. Public
                 transport and schools will soon be sexually segregated. Punishments such as
                 stoning for adultery and amputation for theft - banned not only by the British
                 but throughout the first 40 years of Nigerian independence - have been
                 reinstated.

                 Last year, in Zamfara state, a teenage mother, Bariya Ibrahim Magazu, was
                 flogged 100 times for having sex before marriage. The sentence was carried out
                 even though her case, in which she was planning to argue that she had been
                 raped, had yet to come before an appeal court to be heard.

                 The popularity of Sharia in the north - dominated by the big Hausa and Fulani
                 ethnic groups - has fuelled anger and separatist agitation in the south, where
                 the dominant Yoruba and Ibo tribes are largely Christian. The southerners see
                 Sharia as a way of persecuting Christians. They also fear it will be used to
                 perpetuate the power the north enjoyed during the years of military rule: most
                 of the successive military dictators were Muslims. The southerners also seek
                 more control over revenues from oil, produced entirely in the south.

                 One separatist group, the Oodua Peoples’ Congress, which has significant
                 support in the Yoruba southwest of the country, has led a campaign of violence
                 against northerners that has claimed about 1,000 lives in the past two years.
                 Still Obasanjo, a Christian and a Yoruba himself, is under attack by his fellow
                 southerners. The Christian Association of Nigeria, the biggest non-Muslim
                 religious grouping, has accused the President of failing to uphold Nigeria’s
                 secular constitution, which forbids any level of government from imposing
                 criminal law based on religion.

                 Increasingly, Islamic law and old ethnic tensions are splitting the country and
                 may yet propel it towards renewed civil war. "The roof is already burning over
                 Obasanjo’s head. He thinks it is not," says Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s Nobel
                 Prizewinning author. "Obasanjo thinks that some accidental rain which is ‘The act
                 of God or Allah’ will put out the fire."

                 Meanwhile, Safiya, almost toothless and looking far older than her 35 years, has
                 changed her original plea from one of rape to having had consensual sex with a
                 husband who divorced her two years ago. Before Islam came to northern Nigeria
                 five centuries ago, a woman was not considered to have had sex outside
                 marriage if she had a child by a former husband for up to seven years after the
                 divorce. This pre-Islamic custom has somehow become knitted into Sokoto’s
                 21stcentury Sharia law.

                 That clash between ancient traditional practice and Islamic orthodoxy could yet
                 save Safiya’s life. In one of the few real interviews she has given, Safiya,
                 speaking in Hausa, says: "I felt like dying that day [of the sentence] because of
                 the injustice. I never thought there would be such a penalty. It is because I am
                 poor, my family is poor, and I am a woman."

                 She only recently began to question the law that says an adulteress should be
                 stoned to death. "That one is too political for me to answer," she says. "My fate
                 is in the hands of Allah."

                 To which one letter writer to a newspaper added: "Allah is indeed merciful,
                 Sharia law not so."

                                            From: http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=90222002

KURAMI, Nigeria, April 4 (AFP) - Amina Lawal, a 30-year-old Nigerian woman condemned to die by stoning for adultery, has filed an appeal against her sentence, she told AFP Thursday.

Lawyers hired by a Nigerian women's rights group have filed the appeal, making an initial argument on
technical grounds, at an Islamic court in the town of Funtua in Katsina State, Lawal said.

Saudatu Shehu Mahdi, head of the Women Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative (WRAPA) which is paying for the lawyer, confirmed that the appeal had been lodged.

"This is an initial appeal, which we registered last Thursday, on technical grounds. The appeal date has not yet been set," she said.

The mother of three is the second Nigerian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery since 12
northern Nigerian states restored Islamic law over the past two years.

The first woman, Safiya Husaini, was freed and her sentence dismissed by an appeal court in the city of
Sokoto last month, after vigorous protests in Europe. The sentence was dismissed on technical grounds.

Lawal, twice wed after first marrying at the age of 14, is the youngest of the 13 children of a local farmer.
She was divorced for the second time in June 2000.

After her second divorce, she started a relationship with a man in December that year which lasted until last November, when she gave birth to a daughter, Wasila.

Under the strict Islamic law code in place in a dozen northern states, a woman who is divorced and
subsequently has a sexual relationship with another man, is guilty of adultery, even if he is unmarried.

The punishment for adultery, under strict Islamic law, is stoning to death.

Nigerian Justice Minister Kanu Agabi last month wrote to the 12 northern Nigerian states implementing the code declaring it to be in violation of the constitution.

However, until a test case is taken to the country's Supreme Court, his opinion will not be accepted by the so-called Sharia states, northern officials said.

The softly spoken and largely unschooled Lawal told AFP last month her main worries were the strain the case was putting on her parents and what would happen to Wasila if she is put to death.

In Katsina, the capital of the state of the same name, state spokesman Ibrahim Abdullahi told AFP that
the governor, a close friend of President Olusegun Obasanjo, would not intefere in the appeal process, and predicted that if the appeal was turned down, Lawal would be killed.

"The issue of Amina is a religious one. The Sharia provides for stoning to death for adultery... She has the right to appeal. Protests will not influence the legal proceedings and the government will not be swayed by them.

"If the appeal court confirms her as guilty, she will be executed," he said.

                                                    From: http://www.mertonai.org/amina/afp-cahched1.htm

A cry of "Allahu Akbar", or "God is great", rang out in the courtroom when the judge ruled 30-year-old Amina Lawal be executed once she has weaned her eight-month-old daughter. The Funtua court granted defence lawyers 30 days to appeal, which they have said they will do. Amina Lawal was escorted away in tears by her lawyers who have promised to challenge the decision all the way to the Supreme
court.  FULL STORY ABOUT AMINA AND HER CASE AT:  http://www.mertonai.org/amina/amina.asp
 

Return to Amina Lawal's Homepage

                The CCADP offers free webpages to over 500 Death Row Prisoners
                                              Contact us for more information.
            
                                                       "The Eyes Of The World Are Watching Now"