SANI UMAR, Sokoto, Nigeria | Monday
EXPRESSING gratitude for growing international support, a 35-year-old woman who is due to be stoned to death for adultery by Islamic authorities in northern Nigeria said this weekend she will be seeking ‘justice’ when she launches an appeal on Monday.
“I am grateful and appreciative of all the support I am getting all over the world. I know the support I have,” Safiya Husaini said in an interview.
“What I am hoping for now is justice,” she said, adding that the extra-marital sex she had been convicted of had been forced upon her.
Husaini was sentenced in October last year by a court in Sokoto to the ancient Islamic punishment of death by stoning after being found guilty, under Islamic law, of adultery.
Three-times-divorced Husaini was judged guilty of adultery, rather than the lesser crime of fornication or sex outside marriage, because under Islamic law, as interpreted here, a divorced woman commits adultery if she ever has sex again unless it is with a new husband.
Husaini’s defence is that she was coerced, or raped. Her lawyer, Abdulkadir Imam, also intends to argue that numerous errors were made in the handling of her original case.
“I am innocent. I never consented to sex. I was forced,” said Husaini, adding that she had not mentioned the coercion at her trial because such things are not discussed by women in her Fulani society.
“I could not say it because it is not the tradition of a Fulani woman to discuss these things,” she said, her head bowed.
Husaini gave birth to a baby girl in February last year after a relationship with a man in May of 2000.
Among the objections to be offered by her lawyer is that the alleged offence thus took place before Islamic law came into effect in June 2000. Thus the sentence is retroactive.
The case of Safiya has raised considerable international concern already. Last Wednesday hundreds of people demonstrated outside the Nigerian embassy in Rome to protest the sentence and on Friday a feminist group in Greece added its voice to growing calls for clemency.
The Nigerian government, led by President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian, has promised to back Husaini’s appeal. At a first hearing here last year, lawyers from the federal government’s women’s affairs department attended.
Also last year the then justice minister, Bola Ige, said he would fight the sentence.
Ige was shot dead December 23 in a killing the government says was linked to a local political feud in his home state. But no-one has yet been charged with the killing and speculation is rife about a possible link to Ige’s stance on Husaini’s adultery trial.
Under Islamic law, which was only re-introduced to northern Nigeria in 2000, if the appeal in Sokoto is lost, Husaini’s lawyers would have recourse to another appeal to a higher appeal court in another northern city, Kaduna, and then, finally, the Supreme Court in the capital, Abuja.
Many in Sokoto, however, support the sentence and the authorities are said to be keen to follow through on it to demonstrate their commitment to the Islamic system.
In a sign of that commitment, a higher Islamic court here on Wednesday announced it would rule on January 21 on a second case which could lead to a similar sentence being handed down.
No man has been charged with anything in either case.
However, in September last year a man was sentenced to death by stoning for sodomising a seven-year-old boy. That sentence has also yet to be carried out. – AFP
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