allAfrica.com: Nigeria: New Zeal for Sharia Penalties Reflects Political Climate, Says Rights Activist (Page 1 of 3)

Nigeria: New Zeal for Sharia Penalties Reflects Political Climate, Says Rights Activist

In late September this year, people all over the world breathed a sigh of relief after a Nigerian Sharia court upheld the appeal of Amina Lawal against her conviction for adultery. The intensity of the international reaction related to her punishment. Lawal was found guilty and sentenced in 2001 to death by stoning, a penalty that astounded and appalled many. But on September 25 the appeal judges held that pregnancy outside of marriage is not proof of adultery, that Lawal's alleged confession was no confession in law, and, that her rights of defence had not been properly recognised by the lower courts.

Amina Lawal's trial in a Sharia court followed the decision by a number of states in the Muslim north of Nigeria to introduce Sharia judgement and penalties for a widened range of offenses, among them, adultery. The issue threatened to polarise Nigerian opinion between Muslim and Christian and made the case internationally notorious, triggering Internet petitions, offers of asylum and public protests. Key among a coalition of groups in Nigeria supporting Lawal was Baobab for Women's Human Rights who commented after the verdict: "This sweeping judgement of the Katsina state Sharia Court of Appeal indicates that Ms. Lawal should not have been charged, much less convicted."

Ayesha Imam is a leading member of Baobab for Women's Human Rights who in 2002 won Canada's John Humphrey Freedom Award in recognition of her and Baobab's work in defending and developing women's human rights in secular, customary and Muslim religious laws in Nigeria. She talked to Charles Cobb Jr. about the Lawal case.

Does the decision on Amina Lawal change anything fundamentally? And what are the implications for other women who might be convicted under Sharia law and penalty?

Well, the first thing is that the decision technically is not a binding precedent, except in Katsina State. All of the states are autonomous of each other; it is a federal system. It will have strong persuasive influence on other cases outside of Katsina State because the acts on which all the charges are based differ very little. So it will be quite hard for the Sharia court of appeal in, say, Bauchi to rule something completely different from something the court of appeal in Katsina State has done. Technically they can, but it would be very odd.

On the implications of it - although it was a four-to-one majority and not a consensus, the fact that the majority did find for Amina on every single ground of the appeal means that they have said fairly clearly that they don't consider pregnancy outside of marriage to be sufficient proof of adultery in itself. And that they also don't approve of confessions being coerced or intimidated out of people. And to the extent that any court follows this, it is going to extremely unlikely for there to be a conviction in the absence of four eyewitnesses, a condition that is rather hard to achieve.

Does this get to any of the broader issues that are really political issues that surround the application of Sharia law?

Yes and no. The decision is actually based on very old arguments and precedents in Muslim law - dating back three or four hundred years. So it's not new argument responding to this current political situation. On the other hand, the climate in which the acts were passed was clearly a political climate. It wasn't a religious resurgence that led to passage of the act [introducing new applications of Sharia law]. It was a political move for popular support, if you see what I mean. It was part of that governor's platform that he was going to do this; he wasn't voted in on that basis. He simply, in my opinion, had no other credible program, so chose this.

To that extent, what is very clear is that in all of the states where there are these kinds of acts, they are not part of a continuous long history, but part of a political movement around the identity of being Muslim as in the Sudan, South Pakistan and now Nigeria also. The rate of conviction is very, very high compared to places like Libya where these laws have actually been on the books for hundreds of years. And clearly, the zeal with which the lower courts have been convicting has partly to do with the ignorance of how the law will operate because these laws are new in Nigeria, at least since independence. So none of the judges now sitting on these cases have any experience in it.

Secondly, it had to do with showing that they were really implementing the law. And so we have always said - the Nigerian defenders of the appeal -- the higher we get up into the appeals court, the Sharia court, the more sure we are that the convictions would be overturned because the original idea of the law was as a deterrent rather than a punishment.

Here in the United States, largely non-Muslim, it is difficult to understand how, in a country like Nigeria, you can have one chunk of it - 12 states in this instance - governed by a set of laws that seem to take precedence over the federal law that presumably is supposed to hold in the entire nation.

First of all, that is not completely true. The history is that Nigeria has actually always had, throughout its colonial and post-colonial or independence period, three sets of law: one of which is called federal law or general law or secular law, but which many people see as being influenced by a Christian historical background like, for instance, the fact that the working week is Monday through Friday and not Saturday to Thursday.

web allafrica.com	Enter your search terms	Submit search form
OR subscribers use AllAfrica's premium search engine


Use our pull-down menus to find more stories

Today's Most Active Stories