27 August 2002
Lagos — Despite local and international outcry, Katsina State government yesterday said it would not intervene in the appeal of Amina Lawal whose conviction to death by stoning for having a baby outside wedlock was confirmed by a Sharia Appeal Court.
Last week in Funtua Katsina State, Amina, 30, lost her first appeal against her conviction by an Islamic Sharia court for bearing a child out of wedlock.
But a spokesman for Katsina State, which reintroduced Sharia law in August 2000 said Amina's fate would depend on the result of her appeal.
"Amina's case is entirely a religious one, so nobody has the right to meddle in it," said Ibrahim Abdullahi, spokesman for Katsina governor Umaru Musa Yar'Adua.
"We are aware of the international protests against the sentence but that will not make the state government interfere in the appeal process," he added.
"The impression given is that the government is bent on executing her which is wrong. We have no interest in the case, we allow the judiciary to perform its work," he said.
"What is certain is that the sentence against Amina will not be carried out until all avenues for reprieve under the Sharia are exhausted," Abdullahi said.
One of Amina's defence lawyers, Hauwa Ibrahim, said that an appeal would probably be lodged this week with the Katsina Sharia Appeal court.
"We will definitely challenge the upper sharia court's ruling," she said. "We are only waiting for the records of proceedings at the court to file our appeal. The court is working on them."
However, Sheikh Boureima Abdou Daouda, a rector at the University of Niamey's mosque, yesterday railed at international condemnation of Sharia, after Amina was sentenced to death by stoning.
"In Nigerian states that apply Sharia, many good things happen but you never hear about them. Only the forbidding, castigating side of Islam is ever shown," Daouda said in a message sent to AFP.
"Nigerian Muslims have chosen to apply the Sharia, and they are free to do so," he said, explaining that the Muslim criminal code "only represents an infinitesimally small part of the Sharia."
Daouda said he believed the sentence on should not be carried out until "all possibilities for appeal" have been exhausted.
Among those, he said, were establishing whether or not Amina had fallen pregnant after being raped, if she was already pregnant when she left her husband or if she had been forced into prostitution "to survive".
The father of Amina's eight-month-old daughter must "also assume his responsibilities," Daouda said, before condemning at the "fierce reaction" from the international community over the death sentence.
"You'd think it is the only death sentence pronounced anywhere in the world," he said.
"Why doesn't the international community protest as loudly ... to stop the executions of those on death row in the United States?" he asked, or "the massacres carried out every day" by Israelis against Palestinians, or even "the American bombs and missiles that are falling on Afghan civilians."
On Saturday Obasanjo said he would "weep for Nigeria" if Amina's sentence was carried out and warned that the international outcry would damage prospects for foreign investment.
But he made no offer to intervene in the case.
Attorney General Kanu Godwin Agabi said last week that the incorporation by 12 states, including Katsina, of Sharia law into their criminal code was unconstitutional.
He said that if Amina's appeals fail her case would be brought before the Supreme Court to serve as a test of the 1999 Constitution, the basis for Nigeria's three-year-old democratic experiment.
Several foreign governments, including the United States and the European Union, have expressed concern over Amina's sentence.
Meanwhile, Kenya said yesterday it would boycott the Miss World pageant in Nigeria later this year if the country should uphold an Islamic court's judgement that a woman be stoned to death for having a child out of wedlock.
"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," Kenya's Miss World National Coordinator, Leakey Odera said.
Odera said Kenya would participate if the event was moved to another country, "should Lawal die and leave her child in wilderness".
"Miss World is beauty pageant with a purpose, which tries to make the world a better place to live in," he said.
He urged Nigerian Islamic courts to accommodate calls from the world community, for the benefit of Africa, which he described as "the most marginalised continent.
"Nigeria should think and give Africa an opportunity to host Miss World, since we have been outrightly denied a right to host big global fiestas like the World Cup and the Olympic Games," Odera said.
On Friday, Miss Norway, Miss Kathrine Soerland, through her manager, also threatened to withdraw from the contest if Amina was not pardoned.
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