This is awful.. we need to stop this! (Death by stoning)

[JenniferC]

Amnesty International is gravely concerned at today's decision by a Sharia court of appeal in Funtua in Katsina State, Nigeria, to uphold the sentence of death by stoning imposed on Amina Lawal, a young Nigerian woman who is alleged to have had a child out of wedlock.
This is not the first case many women have been giving death by stoning for having children out of wedlock and the men responsible walk away free in Nigeria. This is heartbreaking. Amina Lawal has now been granted 30 days to appeal against the decision. Also, she has 30 days because she is nursing her baby still.

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[cashhound]

From Snopes:

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Claim: Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman, has been sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery.
Status: True.

Origins: In
March 2002, 30-year-old Amina Lawal (sometimes called Amina Lawal Kurami), was found guilty of the crime of adultery by a court in the remote village of Kurani in Nigeria. The sentence handed down was that she be buried up to her neck and stoned to death.

In August 2002 Amina's appeal was rejected by the regional appeals court and her death sentence upheld. Her execution is to be carried out no earlier than January 2004, giving her time to wean Wasila, the child she conceived out of wedlock.

Amina's story is a sad one. She was the youngest of 13 children and was married when she was 14. That marriage lasted 12 years, and she has two children from that union. A year after her divorce, she wed again. That second marriage proved short-lived, lasting only ten months.

About five months after her second divorce, she began receiving attentions from another man, Yahay Mohammed. They were an item for about eleven months, during which time she conceived. After the baby was born, Yahay admitted paternity and agreed to help support Amina and the child. But he later recanted his admission, bending to pressure from his family, who thought such an admission would bring shame upon them.

Amina was brought before a Sharia court on a charge of adultery. The child in her arms was proof enough that she'd been engaging in sex outside marriage (her baby was born sixteen months after her divorce), and she freely admitted to having had carnal relations with Yahay Mohammed. Later she was to learn just how damning that admission was, but at the time she made it, she likely thought no more of it than its being a necessary part of establishing Yahay as the father of her daughter.

Yahay denied he had had sex with her, and as there was no other proof against him, he was not charged. An adultery charge was returned against Amina, and six weeks later she was sentenced to death.

All of this sounds wildly improbable to Western ears, which are unaccustomed to laws so frighteningly intrusive and the unbelievably harsh penalties attached to them, but this is the way of things under Sharia law. Twelve of Nigeria's nineteen northern Muslim states have adopted the strict Sharia code since 1999, and human rights groups have recorded a series of cases of punishment under the code, including amputations and floggings. Amnesty International has said the punishments amount to "ill-treatment and torture."

Under this strict Islamic rule of law known as the Sharia (the same code imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan), the penalty for adultery when one or both of the participants is (or has been) married is death. Moreover, under a traditionally strict interpretation of the Koran adopted in those nothern states, Amina's pregnancy alone was considered sufficient evidence of her adultery.

Will signing a petition help the cause? In all likelihood it won't. The person to whom the missive is being addressed, Olusegun Obasanjo, the President of Nigeria, is both opposed to the sentence and almost powerless to do anything about it. He has said that under Nigeria's federal system of government the mainly Muslim northern states have every right to reintroduce the Sharia code into their penal law, and that while he will weep for Amina and for Nigeria itself if her execution is carried out, he will not overturn the finding of that court.

Nigeria is a country effectively split into two, with Christians to the south and Muslims to the north. Those nineteen northern provinces have chosen Sharia law, and up until now Nigerian law has recognized the rights of individual states to govern themselves. To suddenly change this by overruling a verdict and sentence handed down by a court in one of those provinces could result in a civil war in that country.

Diplomatic remedies are being sought, and maybe if a passingly plausible loophole can be found, that northern court of appeals will overturn Amina's conviction on even the flimiest of pretexts, as another did in the 2001-2002 case of Safiya Hussaini, another Nigerian woman then under sentence to be stoned to death for having committed adultery. Safiya's conviction was overturned in a Muslim appeals court in March 2002 on the grounds that her "adultery" had taken place prior to Sharia's law being enacted in her region.

Those grounds will not work for Amina, though. The judge at the appeals hearing rejected the argument that her conviction for adultery was invalid because, as her lawyers claimed, the child was born before Sharia law took effect in her area. If a loophole is to be found, it will have to be another.

No appeal has yet been scheduled for Amina before Nigeria's supreme court, and it's not at all certain one ever will be. Such an appeal would test the authority of Islamic courts to hand down such sentences. If it were to be heard, it would create a knotty political situation for Nigeria's federal government. If they deny the appeal, they risk the condemnation of much of the international community (including nearly all of the western world) as well as the discontent of southern Nigerians concerned over the spread of Sharia rule; if they uphold the appeal, they would offend much of Muslim northern Nigeria for daring to overrule Islamic law. No wonder the President of that country is hoping the matter resolves itself before Amina's sentence is due to be carried out, and why at this point all he will offer for her are his tears.

Pressure from the international community plus the announcement that several contestants in the upcoming Miss World beauty pageant (which Nigeria was scheduled to host in December 2002) would boycott the event led the government of Nigeria to issue statements in November 2002 pledging to quash Islamic stoning sentences. However, after an outbreak of violence between Muslims and Christians (triggered in part by opposition to the Miss World content, which has been characterized by fundamentalist Islamic groups as a "parade of nudity" likely to undermine the fight against AIDS) spread to the Nigerian capital of Abuja -- planned site of the beauty pageant -- and left over 100 people dead and several hundred more injured, the Miss World pageant organizers moved the event to London instead, thereby eliminating one of the Nigerian federal government's prime motivations for preventing the execution of Amina's death sentence. Without a reversal of the ruling by the Sharia court reversing its ruling, preventing her execution will require intervention by force, an act that has the potential to plunge Nigeria into civil war.

Would sending letters to the Sharia appeals court in Katsina (the one which has already heard her appeal and rejected it) help? This is even more unlikely: Muslim fundamentalists deeply resent Western interference of any sort at any time, so telling them the world will be angry with them unless they reverse themselves isn't going to be the carrot that will inspire this particular donkey. They believe the teachings of the Koran and their interpretations and applications of them are entirely above matters of world opinion -- to them, they are answering to God, and nothing may be placed ahead of that.


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[Mouse7088]

Taken from Snopes.com...totally sickening... Altho on this same page it does discuss how "ineffective" online petitions can be..ALTHO, one thing that does benefit many of us from them is the fact we DO learn about things that are going on that we may not have otherwise known about. Thanks Jennifer!

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Claim: Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman, has been sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery.

Status: True.

Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]


Origins: In
March 2002, 30-year-old Amina Lawal (sometimes called Amina Lawal Kurami), was found guilty of the crime of adultery by a court in the remote village of Kurani in Nigeria. The sentence handed down was that she be buried up to her neck and stoned to death.

In August 2002 Amina's appeal was rejected by the regional appeals court and her death sentence upheld. Her execution is to be carried out no earlier than January 2004, giving her time to wean Wasila, the child she conceived out of wedlock.

Amina's story is a sad one. She was the youngest of 13 children and was married when she was 14. That marriage lasted 12 years, and she has two children from that union. A year after her divorce, she wed again. That second marriage proved short-lived, lasting only ten months.

About five months after her second divorce, she began receiving attentions from another man, Yahay Mohammed. They were an item for about eleven months, during which time she conceived. After the baby was born, Yahay admitted paternity and agreed to help support Amina and the child. But he later recanted his admission, bending to pressure from his family, who thought such an admission would bring shame upon them.

Amina was brought before a Sharia court on a charge of adultery. The child in her arms was proof enough that she'd been engaging in sex outside marriage (her baby was born sixteen months after her divorce), and she freely admitted to having had carnal relations with Yahay Mohammed. Later she was to learn just how damning that admission was, but at the time she made it, she likely thought no more of it than its being a necessary part of establishing Yahay as the father of her daughter.

Yahay denied he had had sex with her, and as there was no other proof against him, he was not charged. An adultery charge was returned against Amina, and six weeks later she was sentenced to death.

All of this sounds wildly improbable to Western ears, which are unaccustomed to laws so frighteningly intrusive and the unbelievably harsh penalties attached to them, but this is the way of things under Sharia law. Twelve of Nigeria's nineteen northern Muslim states have adopted the strict Sharia code since 1999, and human rights groups have recorded a series of cases of punishment under the code, including amputations and floggings. Amnesty International has said the punishments amount to "ill-treatment and torture."

Under this strict Islamic rule of law known as the Sharia (the same code imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan), the penalty for adultery when one or both of the participants is (or has been) married is death. Moreover, under a traditionally strict interpretation of the Koran adopted in those nothern states, Amina's pregnancy alone was considered sufficient evidence of her adultery.

Will signing a petition help the cause? In all likelihood it won't. The person to whom the missive is being addressed, Olusegun Obasanjo, the President of Nigeria, is both opposed to the sentence and almost powerless to do anything about it. He has said that under Nigeria's federal system of government the mainly Muslim northern states have every right to reintroduce the Sharia code into their penal law, and that while he will weep for Amina and for Nigeria itself if her execution is carried out, he will not overturn the finding of that court.

Nigeria is a country effectively split into two, with Christians to the south and Muslims to the north. Those nineteen northern provinces have chosen Sharia law, and up until now Nigerian law has recognized the rights of individual states to govern themselves. To suddenly change this by overruling a verdict and sentence handed down by a court in one of those provinces could result in a civil war in that country.

Diplomatic remedies are being sought, and maybe if a passingly plausible loophole can be found, that northern court of appeals will overturn Amina's conviction on even the flimiest of pretexts, as another did in the 2001-2002 case of Safiya Hussaini, another Nigerian woman then under sentence to be stoned to death for having committed adultery. Safiya's conviction was overturned in a Muslim appeals court in March 2002 on the grounds that her "adultery" had taken place prior to Sharia's law being enacted in her region.

Those grounds will not work for Amina, though. The judge at the appeals hearing rejected the argument that her conviction for adultery was invalid because, as her lawyers claimed, the child was born before Sharia law took effect in her area. If a loophole is to be found, it will have to be another.

No appeal has yet been scheduled for Amina before Nigeria's supreme court, and it's not at all certain one ever will be. Such an appeal would test the authority of Islamic courts to hand down such sentences. If it were to be heard, it would create a knotty political situation for Nigeria's federal government. If they deny the appeal, they risk the condemnation of much of the international community (including nearly all of the western world) as well as the discontent of southern Nigerians concerned over the spread of Sharia rule; if they uphold the appeal, they would offend much of Muslim northern Nigeria for daring to overrule Islamic law. No wonder the President of that country is hoping the matter resolves itself before Amina's sentence is due to be carried out, and why at this point all he will offer for her are his tears.

Pressure from the international community plus the announcement that several contestants in the upcoming Miss World beauty pageant (which Nigeria was scheduled to host in December 2002) would boycott the event led the government of Nigeria to issue statements in November 2002 pledging to quash Islamic stoning sentences. However, after an outbreak of violence between Muslims and Christians (triggered in part by opposition to the Miss World content, which has been characterized by fundamentalist Islamic groups as a "parade of nudity" likely to undermine the fight against AIDS) spread to the Nigerian capital of Abuja -- planned site of the beauty pageant -- and left over 100 people dead and several hundred more injured, the Miss World pageant organizers moved the event to London instead, thereby eliminating one of the Nigerian federal government's prime motivations for preventing the execution of Amina's death sentence. Without a reversal of the ruling by the Sharia court reversing its ruling, preventing her execution will require intervention by force, an act that has the potential to plunge Nigeria into civil war.

Would sending letters to the Sharia appeals court in Katsina (the one which has already heard her appeal and rejected it) help? This is even more unlikely: Muslim fundamentalists deeply resent Western interference of any sort at any time, so telling them the world will be angry with them unless they reverse themselves isn't going to be the carrot that will inspire this particular donkey. They believe the teachings of the Koran and their interpretations and applications of them are entirely above matters of world opinion -- to them, they are answering to God, and nothing may be placed ahead of that.

Let's hope God calls them direct.

Barbara "and that He reverses the charges" Mikkelson

Last updated: 22 November 2002


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[Mouse7088]

Uhhh Niki...GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!

Oops..you beat me in posting..so I guess I was in YOUR thoughts! LOL!

[Mouse7088]

Here's the other link at the bottom of the snopes.com page that I followed...wow..how friggin' sad...and DISGUSTING treatment!

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"For Adultery, Your Life" - Extracts from a Washington Post Article
David FinkelWashington Post Staff Writer
November 24, 2002


© 2002 The Washington Post Company


Once, when a 32-year-old man named Ahmadu Ibrahim was 16, he got in a fight with a friend, who threw a rock at his head. "Blood gushed," Ibrahim says. "I cried." So he knows what it's like to be hit by a rock.

"But there's no way to compare it to sharia," he says, "because with sharia they will keep throwing and throwing until I am dead."

Somewhere in the world are people who know what Ibrahim will go through if the sentence he received for adultery is carried out. The rocks are supposed to be fist-sized. The face is an acceptable target. And the head, according to some accounts, keeps snapping back until, if it hasn't caved in, it is knocked free of the body.

In Nigeria, though, no one knows firsthand what happens, not yet. The only execution since sharia began was of a murderer, who, despite the judge's suggestion that he be stabbed to death with the knife he used on his victim, was hanged.

The first person to be sentenced to death for adultery was Safiya Hussaini, of Sokoto, whose sentence was eventually overturned on a technicality.

The second was Amina Lawal, of Katsina state, who is in hiding while her case is being appealed.

The third was a woman named Fatima Usman, of Niger state, who one day said, "I like you," to a man who was not her husband.

And the fourth was Ahmadu Ibrahim, who remembers replying to this woman who wasn't his wife, "I like you, too."

And maybe what happened between them could have been handled as two ordinary divorce cases. But in Nigeria, where nothing is ordinary, what did happen can best be summed up by Hauwa Ibrahim, a defense lawyer involved in all of the stoning cases, who says, "Justice can mean 100 things to 100 people in Nigeria."

Meaning that Fatima Usman's version has so far included a pregnancy, a divorce, and the birth of a girl who would eventually fall ill and die. And her husband's version included saying "I divorce you" three times and demanding back the dowry he'd paid of 10,000 naira (about $40). And so it escalated, version by version. Fatima's father demanded the 10,000 naira from Ahmadu Ibrahim, who could only come up with 5,000, which led them to court, where the judge let it be known that he wanted a bribe, which Fatima's father said he paid, only to have the judge announce that he was fining Fatima and Ahmadu 15,000 naira apiece for having sex and that if they couldn't pay they would go to prison for five years. Off they went to prison, which caused Fatima's father to beg the court to reconsider, which it did, saying the sentence was indeed wrong, that the court was now a sharia court and under sharia both should have been sentenced to death.

So, in absentia, they were sentenced to death.

And two months later, Fatima's father, beside himself, is saying, "I never thought it would degenerate to this."

And Ahmadu's wife, who sold her sewing machine, the family's motorbike and most of their clothing while Ahmadu was in prison, is wondering what can be sold next so she'll have enough money to feed their children.

And Ahmadu, just freed on bail, is at his lawyer's office, describing what prison had been like.

Seventy-three days. That's how long he was in. "Hunger," he says of the first 72. "Hot." His bed was the floor, his blanket "was full of lice," the toilet was a bucket shared by 70 men. Then came Day 73. He was taken to the prison office. "I thought maybe my family had come to see me," he says. Instead, there was the warden, and Fatima, and a lawyer, and a friend of theirs who told them that they had been granted bail and then broke the news that they had been resentenced, in absentia, to be stoned.

"I groaned," Ahmadu says, continuing to describe what happened.

And Fatima? "She just kept quiet," he says, while the warden said to them, "When you get home, continue to pray to God so that God will forgive you. I wish you the best."

And with that they were released.

Outside: "Give me 10 naira to buy some peanuts," Ahmadu, dazed, said to Fatima as they waited for the car.

"I don't have any change," she said.

That was all they said to each other. They got in the car and rode in silence back to their village. Ahmadu got out. Fatima remained in her seat and was driven away by the lawyer. Ahmadu watched the car until it disappeared, went to his home where his wife told him she had sold most of their clothes, then walked to his farm where he saw that everything was dead, and broke down.

Sharia in Nigeria:

"Yes, it's God's law," Ahmadu says, "and I believe in it, but the way it is implemented. . . ." He trails off.

"I need help," he says.

He gets up. Time to go home.



First, though, there's someone his lawyer asks him to meet. He is given an address, which brings him to a gate with a bell. He waits until the gate swings open and enters the hiding place of Amina Lawal.

Amina Lawal, who was sentenced to death soon after she gave birth, while the man she swore on the Koran impregnated her was freed because there weren't the required four eyewitnesses to testify they'd seen him having sex.

Who can't remember how old she was when she first married but knows it was before her first period.

Who is now 31, twice married, twice divorced and the mother of three, including 10-month-old Wasila, the proof of her guilt.

Who is to face the stones next fall, once Wasila is no longer breastfeeding.

Who is Nigeria's most infamous adulterer, and who now says to Ahmadu, "Congratulations on your release."

"Thank you," he says.

They look at each other. They are a man and a woman. Unmarried to each other. Alone in the land of sharia.

"May God make us be free," she says, bowing her head in prayer.

Ahmadu bows his head as well. "Amen."


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[cashhound]

bwahahahahah! Sorry Mouse. We were just moments apart...lmao. (Does this mean we spend TOO much time together...lmao.)

That second one...OMG. It's hard for me to accept the way the *justice* system works here in the US...much less in some place that has a completely different culture. That story made me sad, disgusted, weepy...


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[valleygirl]

Wow! How sad. They need 4 eyewitnesses to this? So, if they cannot prove he was the one she slept with, how can they stone her for adultry? Or is it just because she is a divorced or unmarried woman with a child? I wonder what the punishment for fornication is there?

[cujo0123]

that was really painful to read. i realize it is a totally different culture, but we are not wild animals!