Culled from:
clari.news.women,clari.world.africa.western,clari.news.issues,clari.world.mideast
+africa News Groups

*****************

SOKOTO, Nigeria, Dec 9 (AFP) - An illiterate 35-year-old
Nigerian woman is appealing an Islamic court's sentence of death
by stoning for adultery in a case which tests the restoration of
Islamic law in 12 northern states.
   Safiya Husaini was sentenced to death in October by an Islamic
court here, the first woman to receive such a sentence since the
Islamic law code, known as the Sharia, was restored in 12 mainly
Muslim states over the past two years.
   The case, which has started to gain international attention,
went to appeal here last month and the sentence has been
suspended pending the outcome of the appeal.
   Within Nigeria, the case has also received widespread attention,
opposed by the federal minister of justice but supported by the
state attorney general.
   The battlelines have been drawn up between the mainly southern
Nigerian Christian opponents of Islamic law and its mainly northern
Muslim supporters.
   Husaini, born the fifth of 12 children to a farmer and
illiterate herbal doctor in a remote village in the semi-desert
north of Nigeria, was married off at 12, starting the difficult life
of a typical northern Nigerian woman.
   Her marriage, and two subsequent marriages did not last, as
often they do not. Divorced for a third time in 1998, she started
receiving the attention of a man in her village, Yakubu Abubakar.
   She rebuffed this attention, she told AFP in an interview, but
on four occasions, he raped her.
   In the eyes of her Fulani society, this, she said, was shameful
so she did not tell anyone. "I was too ashamed to talk about this to
anybody, not even my mother."
   Islamic law, meanwhile, was brought into effect in her home
state of Sokoto in June last year, a month after she said she had
conceived a child with Abubakar, 10-month-old Adama, born in
February.
   The alleged rape and the fact that she was made pregnant a
month  before the Islamic code was restored here, will form the
basis of her appeal, her lawyer, Abdulkadir Imam Ibrahim, said.
   "It would be crass, a miscarriage of justice, to carry out the
death sentence on me for a baby I conceived through rape," she
told AFP, speaking in the Hausa language used widely across
northern Nigeria.
   Abubakar, however, denied in court being the father of her
child, and retracted an earlier confession to the police.
   The lawyer, paid for by a Nigerian women's rights group, has not
so far been to see his client and appears uncertain about some
aspects of the case.
   He nevertheless sounds confident.
   "We are confident of winning the appeal. There is the fact that
the act took place before the Sharia code was promulgated and
there were procedural errors in the way the case went to court, and
testimony of witnesses," he told AFP.
   However the appeal goes, it is likely to be appealed by the
losing side to higher Sharia courts, first in the northern city of
Kaduna and then, eventually to a Sharia section within the
country's  Supreme Court.
   Nigeria has a complicated constitution drawn up in 1999 in the
dying days of military rule than both declares the country a secular
state and gives its 36 states the right to introduce religious
courts.
   The constitutionality of introducing Islamic has not been
tested.
   Since January 2000, when a first northern state, Zamfara,
introduced or restored Sharia, several convicted thieves have had
their hands amputated and convicted alcholics have been flogged.
   So also was a teenage girl made pregnant, she said, through
rape. In her case, she was flogged because she had not been
married and hence was assumed to be a virgin, hence it was not,
under Islamic law, adultery.
   In September, the state of Kebbi sentenced a man to death by
stoning for sodomizing a seven year old boy. The case has
attracted little attention in Nigeria or outside and the sentence has
not been carried out.
   President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian, has said he believes
the Sharia issue is primarily political and will "fizzle out".
Critics say it has already caused religious unrest in Nigeria and
will cause more.

<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>

To view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]

<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>