KATSINA, Nigeria, 26 September 2003 — Nigerian single mother Amina Lawal was spared from a sentence of death by stoning yesterday when an Islamic court overturned her conviction for adultery in a case that has caused an international outcry over human rights in Nigeria.
Lawal’s supporters hailed the majority ruling, which split a panel of Katsina State’s top Islamic lawyers four to one, as a vital step forward in ensuring the legal rights of Nigeria’s more than 60 million Muslims.
“It’s a victory for law, it’s a victory for justice. Today we are celebrating the victory of law over the rule of man,” said Lawal’s friend and lawyer, Hauwa Ibrahim.
“Amina is free. Amina has been discharged. Amina can have her life back,” she told reporters outside the court, as Lawal and her baby daughter Wasila were whisked away in a police vehicle with a heavily armed escort. Lawal, a 31-year-old village housewife, was last year convicted of adultery, and faced becoming the first person to be stoned to death since its reintroduction in Nigeria, mainly in the northern, predominantly Muslim states.
She appeared before Katsina Sharia Appeal Court in a peach-colored embroidered veil, cradling Wasila, who has grown a thick head of curls since making her first public appearance at her mother’s trial in March last year, when she was only a few months old.
Since then, photographs of mother and child sitting in front of panels of robed judges have flashed around the world, and the case has become the center of an international dispute.
Legal rights campaigners said Lawal’s acquittal was a step forward, but that it must be seen as a first step in ensuring that due process be followed in future cases.
“Amina’s struggle is the struggle of one person, one highly mediatized combat. But there are other such struggles around this country,” said Catherine-Danielle Mabille of the French-based group Doctors Without Borders. Ibrahim told reporters she hoped that Lawal’s victory would serve as a useful but non-binding precedent that could be cited in appeal cases in other states. Each of Nigeria’s 36 states has an independent judicial system.
The court ruled that Lawal should have been allowed to retract her alleged original “confession”, which was taken by a village court after fundamentalist vigilantes raided her home at night shortly after Wasila’s birth. Any defendant has the right to withdraw a confession, which should be made at least four times before a panel of judges, rather than just once before one judge as in Lawal’s case, judge Ibrahim Mai-Ungawa said.
Nigeria’s federal police should not have pressed charges in the case, he added, unless they had four witnesses to the alleged adultery.
“I’m very happy with the ruling,” said Ibrahim.
Katsina State prosecutors said after the hearing they had three months to decide whether to appeal the verdict to a federal court.
