Nigeria: Amina Lawal appeal date - 27 August 2003
Source:
BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights A letter from BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights, Lagos, Nigeria regarding the case of Amina Lawal.
Amina's appeal hearing at the Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal is to be heard on August 27.
Dear friends,
Thank you for forwarding this and being concerned to check before rushing ahead. Do please circulate this response to all those you know might have received the erroneous petition (and anyone else who might be interested/concerned).
The petitions currently being circulated (one is posted below) are WRONG in fact again. Amina's appeal hearing at the Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal had been postponed and is to be heard on August 27. Her case has not yet been heard in the Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal. Therefore, it has not reached the Supreme Court - nor even the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal. In addition, implementation of any sentence is stayed until the final results of any appeals.
This kind of petition is damaging for Amina Lawal's defence and cases like hers. It is particularly damaging for trying to rally public opinion in her defence. As I write, we have just been in meeting in Abuja (Nigeria's capital) on Sharia Penal and Family Law in Nigeria, in which most of us defending Amina and others in similar situations (including BAOBAB, WRAPA, the Nigerian Human Rights Commission and several of the lawyers) were facing directly some of the religious right wing conservative/traditionalists. From many quarters - in this meeting and outside - the reception is extremely hostile of our message that women's and other human rights can and should be respected in sharia (has often been the case in sharia's diversity in time and space as well as in fiqh - Muslim jurisprudence), and, that Muslim laws and international human rights are not necessarily mutually incompatible.
The response of many people here (even those sympathetic to Ms. Lawal) has frequently been to ask why are people in the USA and the UK apparently so concerned over the life of one Muslim woman in Nigeria, when they are killing large numbers of Muslim men women and children regularly and are directly responsible for the horrors of war and its aftermath of infrastructure breakdown, food shortages and disease, nuclear poisoning from lack of attention to patrolling known nuclear sites, in Iraq etc etc. We try to make the point that there is a difference between the USA state and the people, but it is hard in the face of inaccurate and insensitive petitions like these issued not by the state but by individuals.
We have copied Amnesty International on this - following on our last Open Letter, Amnesty International in both the International Secretariat in London, and in the USA issued statements stating that they support the local appeal process and did not think that it was appropriate for this kind of petition at this time. Since then they have also acted to ask people not to circulate petitions like these. The Nigeria team of Amnesty International's International Secretariat (London) assures us that although the webpage address to which the Notice refers to is an Amnesty website, the text (NOTICE) introducing the petition below is not circulated by Amnesty International.
We paste below also our Open Letter of May 2003, in case you have not seen it, as all the comments therein (with the exception of the current appeal hearing date) remain valid. In addition, for those who would like to make donations to support the defences, we have a new address as the Canadian NGO Rights and Democracy (formerly known as the International Centre for Rights and Democratic Development) has kindly agreed to handle donations to BAOBAB, in order to allay the concerns of those worried about the possibility of fraud in sending money to Nigeria.
If people want to help, at a minimum, do please get the facts right. We would appreciate it too if they would support the efforts of human rights defenders here in Nigeria, instead of making things more difficult.
Finally, we would like to thank the many, many people who responded to the original Open Letter, in support, in critique and in donations to support the work.
Best
Ayesha Imam (Board Member)
Sindi Médar-Gould (Executive Director)
BAOBAB for Women s Human Rights
Read the statement by Amnesty International
THIS IS THE ERRONEOUS MESSAGE
NOTICE:
Subject: Amina Lawal Execution Hearing on AMINA LAWAL SET TO BE STONED ON 27 AUGUST 2003 The Nigerian Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence for Amina Lawal, condemned for the crime of adultery on August 19th 2002, to be buried up to her neck and stoned to death. Her death was postponed so that she could continue to nurse her baby. Hearing on her Execution is now set for 27 AUGUST 2003. If you haven't been following this case, you might like to know That Amina's baby is regarded as the 'evidence' of her adultery. Amina's case is being handled by the Spanish branch of Amnesty International, which is attempting to put together enough signatures to make the Nigerian government rescind the death sentence. A similar campaign saved another Nigerian woman, Safiya, condemned in similar circumstances. By March 4th the petition had amassed over 2,600,000 signatures. It will only take you a few seconds to sign Amnesty's online petition. Please sign the petition now, then copy this message into a new email and send it to everyone in your address book. Go to the web page http://www.amnesty.org.au/e-card/petition.asp
Circulated in May 2003 by BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights
This remains accurate except that the date of the appeal hearing in Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal is now August 27, 2003.
Please Stop the International Amina Lawal Protest Letter Campaigns
Dear friends,
There have been a whole host of petitions and letter writing campaigns about Amina Lawal (sentenced to stoning to death for adultery in August 2002). Many of these are inaccurate and ineffective and may even be damaging to her case and those of others in similar situations. BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, which is responsible for initiating and continuing to support the defences of cases like Ms. Lawal’s, thanks the world for its support and concern, but requests that you please stop the Amina Lawal international protest letter campaigns for now (May 2003). The information currently circulated is inaccurate, and the situation in Nigeria, being volatile, will not be helped by such campaigns. At the end of this letter, we indicate ways in which you can help us and we hope we can count on your continuing support.
Clarification of Facts
First, we would like to pass on some facts that hopefully will clarify the situation somewhat. Contrary to information being widely circulated, Amina Lawal’s conviction has NOT been upheld by Nigeria’s Supreme Court. Ms. Lawal was originally convicted by an Upper Area Court in Katsina State in northern Nigeria. Her appeal is currently before the Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal. The appeal had been several times postponed. However the next appeal hearing has now been set for June 3, 2003. Should this appeal not succeed, Ms. Lawal would appeal to the (Nigerian Federal) Sharia Court of Appeal. Only if unsuccessful at the federal appeal court also would Ms. Lawal’s case go to the Supreme Court of Nigeria. In other words, the process is a long way from immediate stoning to death. Although the stress on Ms. Lawal is obviously considerable and awful, she is not in immediate danger of a judicial execution.
Furthermore, so far, not one appeal that has been taken up by BAOBAB and supporting local NGOs in Nigeria has been lost. All the completed appeals processes have been successful. Again, so far, all these appeals have been won in local state Sharia courts - none have yet needed to go up to the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, from whence appeals would go to the Supreme Court. (We do note, however, that there is still work to be done at this level, as sometimes the judges have chosen to quash on technicalities, thus avoiding the substantive grounds of the appeals. However, we note also that historically, the State Sharia Courts of Appeal, and especially the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, have passed judgements that are more gender-fair – in marked contrast to the lower courts where all of these convictions were passed).
Contrary to the statements in many of the internationally originated appeals for petitions and protest letters, none of the victims received a pardon as a result of international pressure. None of them has received a pardon at all – or needed to, so far.
None of the sentences of stoning to death have been carried out. Either the appeals were successful or those convicted are still in the appeals process.
Dangers of Letter Writing Campaigns?
However, if there is an immediate physical danger to Ms. Lawal and others, it is from vigilante and political further (over)reaction to international attempts at pressure. This has happened already in the case of Bariya Magazu, the unmarried teenager convicted of zina (extra-marital sex) and sentenced to flogging in Zamfara in 1999. Ms. Magazu’s sentence was quite illegally brought forward with no notice, despite the earlier assurances of the trial judge that the sentence would not be carried out for at least a year. She was told the night before that it would be carried out very early the next morning (and thus had no way of contacting anyone for help even if this unschooled and poor rural teenager had access to a telephone or organizing knowledge and experience), whilst the state bureaucracy had been instructed to obstruct and was physically refusing to take the appeal papers from BAOBAB’s lawyers. The extra-legal carrying out of the sentence was not despite national and international pressure; it was deliberately to defy it. The Governor of Zamfara State boasted of his resistance to “these letters from infidels” – even to sniggering over how many letters he had received. Thus, we would like you to recognise that an international protest letter campaign is not necessarily the most productive way to act in every situation. On the contrary, women’s rights defenders should assess potential backlash effects before devising strategies.
Problems with Petitions based on Inaccurate Information
Even when protests are appropriate forms of action, when they are obviously based on inaccuracies of fact they are easier to ignore. Circulating protests and writing letters based on inaccurate information may further damage the situation instead of helping. They certainly damage the credibility of the local activists, who are assumed to have supplied this information. If we remember that it is local activists who most facilitate turning rights principles into everyday reality for people, then reducing the ability and potential of local activists to carry out women’s and human rights promotion and defence is a counter-productive mode of proceeding. Please check the accuracy of the information with local activists, before further circulating petitions or responding to them.
Re-Presenting negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims
Dominant colonialist discourses and the mainstream international media have presented Islam (and Africa) as the barbaric and savage Other. Please do not buy into this. Accepting stereotypes that present Islam as incompatible with human rights not only perpetuates racism but also confirms the claims of right-wing politico-religious extremists in all of our contexts. We appreciate that many who join letter writing campaigns are motivated by the same sense of international solidarity and feminist outrage that leads us at BAOBAB to participate in international actions. But when protest letters re-present negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, they inflame sentiments rather than encouraging reflection and strengthening local progressive movements. They may result in behaviour such as that of the Zamfara State governor over Bariya Magazu, or even more threatening, hostile and violent behaviour by vigilantes (in extra-legal acts by non-state actors like the hordes of young unemployed men who are the bulk of the vigilantes). Consequently, such letters can put in further danger both the victims who are easily reachable in their home communities, and, the activists and lawyers supporting them (who are particularly vulnerable when they have to walk through hostile crowds on their way to court, for instance).
Muslim discourses and the invocation of Islam have been used both to vindicate and protect women s rights in some places and times, and to violate and restrict them in other places and times - as in the present case. The same can be said of many, many other religions and discourses (for example, Christianity, capitalism, socialism, modernization to name but a few). The point is for us to question who is invoking Islam (or whatever belief/discourse) for what purposes, and also to acknowledge and support internal dissent within the community involved, rather than engaging in a wholesale condemnation of peoples’ beliefs and cultures, which is seldom accurate or effective in changing views within the affected community. Please be sensitive to these concerns in any protest letters you may write.
Supporting Local Pressures
There is a place for international pressure and campaigns. We would not risk anyone’s life by insisting on never having an international campaign. However, using international protest appeals as the automatic response reduces its usefulness as an advocacy tool. We feel that this is not the time for an international letter writing campaign, but we are concerned that should the situation change, and we then need international pressure and ask for international support, the moral energy and indignation of the world may already have been spent - resulting in campaign fatigue (been there, done that already).
International letter writing campaigns have specific potential that can be spectacularly successful (as in the case of Fatima Yacoub in Tchad in the mid-1990s). However, they are not appropriate in this campaign at this time. This is not one individual case. Not all the cases of conviction have made the international headlines or even the national media. They cannot all become international causes célèbres and subjects for letter-writing protests. (Very few people know the name of Hafsatu Abubakar, the first woman to be acquitted after appealing a stoning to death sentence, nor any of the other 8 women and 10 youths whose current cases BAOBAB is also dealing with, for instance).
Using local structures and mechanisms (as a means of resisting retrogressive laws or interpretations of laws and the forces behind them) is the priority. It strengthens local counter-discourses and often carries greater legitimacy than 'outside' pressure. Further, it can really address the local political power struggles that are behind the political use of religions and ethnicities in Nigeria. The political Islamists and vigilantes threaten (and carry out) acts of violence against those who criticise them, in order to intimidate people. But they have also been promoting the view that any criticism or appeal of conviction is anti-Islam and tantamount to apostasy, and thereby trying to get people to submit quietly and voluntarily. One of the means of countering this was our choice to pursue the appeals in the Sharia system, and thereby demonstrate that people have a right to appeal and to challenge injustices, including those made in the name of Islam.
Every appeal in the local sharia courts strengthens this process. Since the first cases, that of Bariya Magazu, (where BAOBAB had to convince her family and various opinion-leaders in the village to agree to an appeal) and the Jangedi case (where a man convicted of theft refused to appeal and had his hand amputated), many victims have no longer acquiesced to injustices, but actively sought help. Furthermore, in both Safiya Husseini Tungar-Tudu’s and Amina Lawal’s cases, members of their community have spoken about the abuse of Sharia and taken actions to protect them from local vigilantes. These are actions that would not have happened when BAOBAB first started this work in 1999. At that time, even finding a lawyer from the Muslim community willing to represent the victim was not easy.
Winning appeals in the Sharia courts, as we and others have done, establishes that convictions should not have been made. A pardon means that people are guilty but the state is forgiving them for it. It does not have the same moral and political resonance. A pardon that is perceived as occurring as a result of outside pressure is even less likely to convince the community of its rightness. If we don’t want such abuses to go on and on, then we have to convince the community not to accept injustices even when perpetrated in the name of strongly held beliefs.
Deciding on Strategies to Fight Injustices
We are asking for international solidarity strategies that respect the analyses and agency of those activists most closely involved and in touch with the issues on the ground and the wishes of the women and men directly suffering rights violations. The local groups in Nigeria directly representing victims (in the lead of whom are BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights and WRAPA – Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Agency) have specifically asked that there NOT be international letter writing campaigns. When victims of human rights abuses are held incommunicado, then clearly all anyone can do is act on our own beliefs to try and help them. This is not such a situation. The victims are not in detention (and indeed give press interviews). They have chosen to appeal and accepted the assistance of NGOs like BAOBAB, WRAPA and the networks of Nigerian women’s and human rights NGOs that support them. There is an unbecoming arrogance in assuming that international human rights organisations or others always know better than those directly involved, and therefore can take actions that fly in the face of their express wishes. Of course, there is always the possibility that those directly involved are wrong but surely the course of action is to persuade them of the correctness of one’s analysis and strategies, rather than ignore their wishes. They at least have to live directly with the consequences of any wrong decisions that they take. Please do liaise with those whose rights have been violated and/or local groups directly involved to discuss strategies of solidarity and support before launching campaigns.
So how can people and other organisations help?
In the immediate, resources (money but not only money) are needed to support both the victims directly and the appeal processes. The victims – almost all of them poor, and most also rural dwellers - have found that their lives and work and those of their families are disrupted. They are economically hard hit, as well as under considerable social pressure. Often their health (physical and psychological) suffers as a result of stress. Sometimes a safe house is needed in the face of threats from vigilantes - there are no institutional ones in northern Nigeria. It may be necessary to consider safe asylum (bearing in mind issues like travel documents, visas, costs and how government bureaucracies will react). Resources are needed for living expenses for victims, their dependents and families, and to deal with stress-related consequences (counselling support, medical treatments and drugs amongst them), and to deal with safety and security. Experience and strategy-sharing with other groups who have dealt with similar situations supporting victims through an appeals process and campaign would also be most welcome.
Then there are the costs of fighting the appeals. Obviously there are legal costs. These include court fees and lawyers’ fees. (Not all lawyers are willing or financially able to work completely pro bono. Even when they donate their expertise, they may have to be paid for court appearances, travel and subsistence expenses). They also include costs in document preparation especially in multiple copies and so on. There are also a whole series of associated costs. Fighting appeals is person and time-intensive. Activists have to; check media and local networks to find victims; travel to offer support to victims; draw on networks to find lawyers willing to represent victims; convene and participate in strategy sessions (yet more travel as these are often national); prepare the arguments and documentation; travel to the court with the victims; engage in victim support (discuss their situations and the possible options and ramifications, deal with consequential issues like loss of land, or ill-health, provide emotional support); liaise with and service the local and international networks supporting such work; not to mention write the reports and analyses constantly required. Resources to support all this work is needed.
Women’s rights activists working on these issues very early on received support from progressive lawyers, Islamic scholars and rights activists from throughout Nigeria, the Muslim world and elsewhere, in the form of legal and religious argumentation (fiqh), case law examples and strategies which were generously shared. We would like to acknowledge this help and support - it has been extremely useful and we can probably never have enough of it.
For the long-term, there are two needs to work on: constructing the cultures of recognizing rights and fighting violations at the local and national levels; and, to develop argumentation and advocacy to change the laws, evidence requirements and procedures.
In sum, funding for credible organizations doing both immediate and long-term work is urgently needed.
Exchanges of information, experiences and knowledge in similar situations would also be helpful.
Practical offer of safe havens – outside the community but within Nigeria, and, outside of Nigeria may also be needed.
Finally, do please circulate this message widely – including to all the listservs and networks where petitions based on inaccurate information have been circulated. If you would share and discuss this message with other activists and organisations who have demonstrated their solidarity on these cases, that would be helpful.
Respectfully
Ayesha Imam (Board Member)
Sindi Medar-Gould (Executive Director)
BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights
BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights has been closely involved with defending the rights of women, men and children in Muslim, customary and secular laws - and in particular of those convicted under the new Sharia Criminal legislation acts passed in Nigeria since 2000. In fact, BAOBAB was the first (and for several months the only) NGO with members from the Muslim community, who were willing to speak publicly against retrogressive versions of Muslim laws and to work on changing the dominant conservative understanding of the rights of women in enacted Sharia (Muslim religious laws), as well as in customary and secular laws. BOABAB was also the first, and again for some time the only NGO to actually find the victims and support their appeals, raising funds for the costs and putting together a strategy team of women's and human rights activists, lawyers and Islamic scholars contributing their expertise and time voluntarily. BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights was the 2002 recipient of the John Humphrey Freedom Award for this work. BAOBAB's work was also recently cited by the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women as an example of best practice.
If you would like to support BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights work, please send a check/cheque or international money order (preferably in Nigerian Naira, US$ or UK sterling) made out to:
a) BAOBAB / WLUML-AME Legal Defence Fund (supports the immediate costs victims and appeals process); and/or
b) BAOBAB / WLUML-AME Rights Advocacy Fund (supports the long-term work in enabling the critique of the rights in Muslim laws, as in customary and secular laws, and to work on the reconstruction of rights in law and practice); and/or
c) BAOBAB / WLUML-AME Core Funding (enables flexibility in usage - it must still be accounted for and reported on)
These should be sent to:
BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights
PO Box 73630
Victoria Island
Lagos (Nigeria)
or
BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights
PO Box 28445
London N19 5NZ
UK
or
Rights & Democracy - Droits et Démocratie
1001, boul. de Maisonneuve Est Bureau 1100,
Montréal (Québec)
Canada H2L 4A2
Tel: 514 283 6073
Fax: 514 283 3792
http://www.ichrdd.ca
NB - Check/Money order made out to ‘Rights and Democracy’ (mentioning BAOBAB as the reason for the cheque) as this Canadian NGO has kindly agreed to handle donations for BAOBAB.
Thank you for forwarding this and being concerned to check before rushing ahead. Do please circulate this response to all those you know might have received the erroneous petition (and anyone else who might be interested/concerned).
The petitions currently being circulated (one is posted below) are WRONG in fact again. Amina's appeal hearing at the Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal had been postponed and is to be heard on August 27. Her case has not yet been heard in the Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal. Therefore, it has not reached the Supreme Court - nor even the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal. In addition, implementation of any sentence is stayed until the final results of any appeals.
This kind of petition is damaging for Amina Lawal's defence and cases like hers. It is particularly damaging for trying to rally public opinion in her defence. As I write, we have just been in meeting in Abuja (Nigeria's capital) on Sharia Penal and Family Law in Nigeria, in which most of us defending Amina and others in similar situations (including BAOBAB, WRAPA, the Nigerian Human Rights Commission and several of the lawyers) were facing directly some of the religious right wing conservative/traditionalists. From many quarters - in this meeting and outside - the reception is extremely hostile of our message that women's and other human rights can and should be respected in sharia (has often been the case in sharia's diversity in time and space as well as in fiqh - Muslim jurisprudence), and, that Muslim laws and international human rights are not necessarily mutually incompatible.
The response of many people here (even those sympathetic to Ms. Lawal) has frequently been to ask why are people in the USA and the UK apparently so concerned over the life of one Muslim woman in Nigeria, when they are killing large numbers of Muslim men women and children regularly and are directly responsible for the horrors of war and its aftermath of infrastructure breakdown, food shortages and disease, nuclear poisoning from lack of attention to patrolling known nuclear sites, in Iraq etc etc. We try to make the point that there is a difference between the USA state and the people, but it is hard in the face of inaccurate and insensitive petitions like these issued not by the state but by individuals.
We have copied Amnesty International on this - following on our last Open Letter, Amnesty International in both the International Secretariat in London, and in the USA issued statements stating that they support the local appeal process and did not think that it was appropriate for this kind of petition at this time. Since then they have also acted to ask people not to circulate petitions like these. The Nigeria team of Amnesty International's International Secretariat (London) assures us that although the webpage address to which the Notice refers to is an Amnesty website, the text (NOTICE) introducing the petition below is not circulated by Amnesty International.
We paste below also our Open Letter of May 2003, in case you have not seen it, as all the comments therein (with the exception of the current appeal hearing date) remain valid. In addition, for those who would like to make donations to support the defences, we have a new address as the Canadian NGO Rights and Democracy (formerly known as the International Centre for Rights and Democratic Development) has kindly agreed to handle donations to BAOBAB, in order to allay the concerns of those worried about the possibility of fraud in sending money to Nigeria.
If people want to help, at a minimum, do please get the facts right. We would appreciate it too if they would support the efforts of human rights defenders here in Nigeria, instead of making things more difficult.
Finally, we would like to thank the many, many people who responded to the original Open Letter, in support, in critique and in donations to support the work.
Best
Ayesha Imam (Board Member)
Sindi Médar-Gould (Executive Director)
BAOBAB for Women s Human Rights
Read the statement by Amnesty International
THIS IS THE ERRONEOUS MESSAGE
NOTICE:
Subject: Amina Lawal Execution Hearing on AMINA LAWAL SET TO BE STONED ON 27 AUGUST 2003 The Nigerian Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence for Amina Lawal, condemned for the crime of adultery on August 19th 2002, to be buried up to her neck and stoned to death. Her death was postponed so that she could continue to nurse her baby. Hearing on her Execution is now set for 27 AUGUST 2003. If you haven't been following this case, you might like to know That Amina's baby is regarded as the 'evidence' of her adultery. Amina's case is being handled by the Spanish branch of Amnesty International, which is attempting to put together enough signatures to make the Nigerian government rescind the death sentence. A similar campaign saved another Nigerian woman, Safiya, condemned in similar circumstances. By March 4th the petition had amassed over 2,600,000 signatures. It will only take you a few seconds to sign Amnesty's online petition. Please sign the petition now, then copy this message into a new email and send it to everyone in your address book. Go to the web page http://www.amnesty.org.au/e-card/petition.asp
Circulated in May 2003 by BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights
This remains accurate except that the date of the appeal hearing in Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal is now August 27, 2003.
Please Stop the International Amina Lawal Protest Letter Campaigns
Dear friends,
There have been a whole host of petitions and letter writing campaigns about Amina Lawal (sentenced to stoning to death for adultery in August 2002). Many of these are inaccurate and ineffective and may even be damaging to her case and those of others in similar situations. BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, which is responsible for initiating and continuing to support the defences of cases like Ms. Lawal’s, thanks the world for its support and concern, but requests that you please stop the Amina Lawal international protest letter campaigns for now (May 2003). The information currently circulated is inaccurate, and the situation in Nigeria, being volatile, will not be helped by such campaigns. At the end of this letter, we indicate ways in which you can help us and we hope we can count on your continuing support.
Clarification of Facts
First, we would like to pass on some facts that hopefully will clarify the situation somewhat. Contrary to information being widely circulated, Amina Lawal’s conviction has NOT been upheld by Nigeria’s Supreme Court. Ms. Lawal was originally convicted by an Upper Area Court in Katsina State in northern Nigeria. Her appeal is currently before the Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal. The appeal had been several times postponed. However the next appeal hearing has now been set for June 3, 2003. Should this appeal not succeed, Ms. Lawal would appeal to the (Nigerian Federal) Sharia Court of Appeal. Only if unsuccessful at the federal appeal court also would Ms. Lawal’s case go to the Supreme Court of Nigeria. In other words, the process is a long way from immediate stoning to death. Although the stress on Ms. Lawal is obviously considerable and awful, she is not in immediate danger of a judicial execution.
Furthermore, so far, not one appeal that has been taken up by BAOBAB and supporting local NGOs in Nigeria has been lost. All the completed appeals processes have been successful. Again, so far, all these appeals have been won in local state Sharia courts - none have yet needed to go up to the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, from whence appeals would go to the Supreme Court. (We do note, however, that there is still work to be done at this level, as sometimes the judges have chosen to quash on technicalities, thus avoiding the substantive grounds of the appeals. However, we note also that historically, the State Sharia Courts of Appeal, and especially the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, have passed judgements that are more gender-fair – in marked contrast to the lower courts where all of these convictions were passed).
Contrary to the statements in many of the internationally originated appeals for petitions and protest letters, none of the victims received a pardon as a result of international pressure. None of them has received a pardon at all – or needed to, so far.
None of the sentences of stoning to death have been carried out. Either the appeals were successful or those convicted are still in the appeals process.
Dangers of Letter Writing Campaigns?
However, if there is an immediate physical danger to Ms. Lawal and others, it is from vigilante and political further (over)reaction to international attempts at pressure. This has happened already in the case of Bariya Magazu, the unmarried teenager convicted of zina (extra-marital sex) and sentenced to flogging in Zamfara in 1999. Ms. Magazu’s sentence was quite illegally brought forward with no notice, despite the earlier assurances of the trial judge that the sentence would not be carried out for at least a year. She was told the night before that it would be carried out very early the next morning (and thus had no way of contacting anyone for help even if this unschooled and poor rural teenager had access to a telephone or organizing knowledge and experience), whilst the state bureaucracy had been instructed to obstruct and was physically refusing to take the appeal papers from BAOBAB’s lawyers. The extra-legal carrying out of the sentence was not despite national and international pressure; it was deliberately to defy it. The Governor of Zamfara State boasted of his resistance to “these letters from infidels” – even to sniggering over how many letters he had received. Thus, we would like you to recognise that an international protest letter campaign is not necessarily the most productive way to act in every situation. On the contrary, women’s rights defenders should assess potential backlash effects before devising strategies.
Problems with Petitions based on Inaccurate Information
Even when protests are appropriate forms of action, when they are obviously based on inaccuracies of fact they are easier to ignore. Circulating protests and writing letters based on inaccurate information may further damage the situation instead of helping. They certainly damage the credibility of the local activists, who are assumed to have supplied this information. If we remember that it is local activists who most facilitate turning rights principles into everyday reality for people, then reducing the ability and potential of local activists to carry out women’s and human rights promotion and defence is a counter-productive mode of proceeding. Please check the accuracy of the information with local activists, before further circulating petitions or responding to them.
Re-Presenting negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims
Dominant colonialist discourses and the mainstream international media have presented Islam (and Africa) as the barbaric and savage Other. Please do not buy into this. Accepting stereotypes that present Islam as incompatible with human rights not only perpetuates racism but also confirms the claims of right-wing politico-religious extremists in all of our contexts. We appreciate that many who join letter writing campaigns are motivated by the same sense of international solidarity and feminist outrage that leads us at BAOBAB to participate in international actions. But when protest letters re-present negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, they inflame sentiments rather than encouraging reflection and strengthening local progressive movements. They may result in behaviour such as that of the Zamfara State governor over Bariya Magazu, or even more threatening, hostile and violent behaviour by vigilantes (in extra-legal acts by non-state actors like the hordes of young unemployed men who are the bulk of the vigilantes). Consequently, such letters can put in further danger both the victims who are easily reachable in their home communities, and, the activists and lawyers supporting them (who are particularly vulnerable when they have to walk through hostile crowds on their way to court, for instance).
Muslim discourses and the invocation of Islam have been used both to vindicate and protect women s rights in some places and times, and to violate and restrict them in other places and times - as in the present case. The same can be said of many, many other religions and discourses (for example, Christianity, capitalism, socialism, modernization to name but a few). The point is for us to question who is invoking Islam (or whatever belief/discourse) for what purposes, and also to acknowledge and support internal dissent within the community involved, rather than engaging in a wholesale condemnation of peoples’ beliefs and cultures, which is seldom accurate or effective in changing views within the affected community. Please be sensitive to these concerns in any protest letters you may write.
Supporting Local Pressures
There is a place for international pressure and campaigns. We would not risk anyone’s life by insisting on never having an international campaign. However, using international protest appeals as the automatic response reduces its usefulness as an advocacy tool. We feel that this is not the time for an international letter writing campaign, but we are concerned that should the situation change, and we then need international pressure and ask for international support, the moral energy and indignation of the world may already have been spent - resulting in campaign fatigue (been there, done that already).
International letter writing campaigns have specific potential that can be spectacularly successful (as in the case of Fatima Yacoub in Tchad in the mid-1990s). However, they are not appropriate in this campaign at this time. This is not one individual case. Not all the cases of conviction have made the international headlines or even the national media. They cannot all become international causes célèbres and subjects for letter-writing protests. (Very few people know the name of Hafsatu Abubakar, the first woman to be acquitted after appealing a stoning to death sentence, nor any of the other 8 women and 10 youths whose current cases BAOBAB is also dealing with, for instance).
Using local structures and mechanisms (as a means of resisting retrogressive laws or interpretations of laws and the forces behind them) is the priority. It strengthens local counter-discourses and often carries greater legitimacy than 'outside' pressure. Further, it can really address the local political power struggles that are behind the political use of religions and ethnicities in Nigeria. The political Islamists and vigilantes threaten (and carry out) acts of violence against those who criticise them, in order to intimidate people. But they have also been promoting the view that any criticism or appeal of conviction is anti-Islam and tantamount to apostasy, and thereby trying to get people to submit quietly and voluntarily. One of the means of countering this was our choice to pursue the appeals in the Sharia system, and thereby demonstrate that people have a right to appeal and to challenge injustices, including those made in the name of Islam.
Every appeal in the local sharia courts strengthens this process. Since the first cases, that of Bariya Magazu, (where BAOBAB had to convince her family and various opinion-leaders in the village to agree to an appeal) and the Jangedi case (where a man convicted of theft refused to appeal and had his hand amputated), many victims have no longer acquiesced to injustices, but actively sought help. Furthermore, in both Safiya Husseini Tungar-Tudu’s and Amina Lawal’s cases, members of their community have spoken about the abuse of Sharia and taken actions to protect them from local vigilantes. These are actions that would not have happened when BAOBAB first started this work in 1999. At that time, even finding a lawyer from the Muslim community willing to represent the victim was not easy.
Winning appeals in the Sharia courts, as we and others have done, establishes that convictions should not have been made. A pardon means that people are guilty but the state is forgiving them for it. It does not have the same moral and political resonance. A pardon that is perceived as occurring as a result of outside pressure is even less likely to convince the community of its rightness. If we don’t want such abuses to go on and on, then we have to convince the community not to accept injustices even when perpetrated in the name of strongly held beliefs.
Deciding on Strategies to Fight Injustices
We are asking for international solidarity strategies that respect the analyses and agency of those activists most closely involved and in touch with the issues on the ground and the wishes of the women and men directly suffering rights violations. The local groups in Nigeria directly representing victims (in the lead of whom are BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights and WRAPA – Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Agency) have specifically asked that there NOT be international letter writing campaigns. When victims of human rights abuses are held incommunicado, then clearly all anyone can do is act on our own beliefs to try and help them. This is not such a situation. The victims are not in detention (and indeed give press interviews). They have chosen to appeal and accepted the assistance of NGOs like BAOBAB, WRAPA and the networks of Nigerian women’s and human rights NGOs that support them. There is an unbecoming arrogance in assuming that international human rights organisations or others always know better than those directly involved, and therefore can take actions that fly in the face of their express wishes. Of course, there is always the possibility that those directly involved are wrong but surely the course of action is to persuade them of the correctness of one’s analysis and strategies, rather than ignore their wishes. They at least have to live directly with the consequences of any wrong decisions that they take. Please do liaise with those whose rights have been violated and/or local groups directly involved to discuss strategies of solidarity and support before launching campaigns.
So how can people and other organisations help?
In the immediate, resources (money but not only money) are needed to support both the victims directly and the appeal processes. The victims – almost all of them poor, and most also rural dwellers - have found that their lives and work and those of their families are disrupted. They are economically hard hit, as well as under considerable social pressure. Often their health (physical and psychological) suffers as a result of stress. Sometimes a safe house is needed in the face of threats from vigilantes - there are no institutional ones in northern Nigeria. It may be necessary to consider safe asylum (bearing in mind issues like travel documents, visas, costs and how government bureaucracies will react). Resources are needed for living expenses for victims, their dependents and families, and to deal with stress-related consequences (counselling support, medical treatments and drugs amongst them), and to deal with safety and security. Experience and strategy-sharing with other groups who have dealt with similar situations supporting victims through an appeals process and campaign would also be most welcome.
Then there are the costs of fighting the appeals. Obviously there are legal costs. These include court fees and lawyers’ fees. (Not all lawyers are willing or financially able to work completely pro bono. Even when they donate their expertise, they may have to be paid for court appearances, travel and subsistence expenses). They also include costs in document preparation especially in multiple copies and so on. There are also a whole series of associated costs. Fighting appeals is person and time-intensive. Activists have to; check media and local networks to find victims; travel to offer support to victims; draw on networks to find lawyers willing to represent victims; convene and participate in strategy sessions (yet more travel as these are often national); prepare the arguments and documentation; travel to the court with the victims; engage in victim support (discuss their situations and the possible options and ramifications, deal with consequential issues like loss of land, or ill-health, provide emotional support); liaise with and service the local and international networks supporting such work; not to mention write the reports and analyses constantly required. Resources to support all this work is needed.
Women’s rights activists working on these issues very early on received support from progressive lawyers, Islamic scholars and rights activists from throughout Nigeria, the Muslim world and elsewhere, in the form of legal and religious argumentation (fiqh), case law examples and strategies which were generously shared. We would like to acknowledge this help and support - it has been extremely useful and we can probably never have enough of it.
For the long-term, there are two needs to work on: constructing the cultures of recognizing rights and fighting violations at the local and national levels; and, to develop argumentation and advocacy to change the laws, evidence requirements and procedures.
In sum, funding for credible organizations doing both immediate and long-term work is urgently needed.
Exchanges of information, experiences and knowledge in similar situations would also be helpful.
Practical offer of safe havens – outside the community but within Nigeria, and, outside of Nigeria may also be needed.
Finally, do please circulate this message widely – including to all the listservs and networks where petitions based on inaccurate information have been circulated. If you would share and discuss this message with other activists and organisations who have demonstrated their solidarity on these cases, that would be helpful.
Respectfully
Ayesha Imam (Board Member)
Sindi Medar-Gould (Executive Director)
BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights
BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights has been closely involved with defending the rights of women, men and children in Muslim, customary and secular laws - and in particular of those convicted under the new Sharia Criminal legislation acts passed in Nigeria since 2000. In fact, BAOBAB was the first (and for several months the only) NGO with members from the Muslim community, who were willing to speak publicly against retrogressive versions of Muslim laws and to work on changing the dominant conservative understanding of the rights of women in enacted Sharia (Muslim religious laws), as well as in customary and secular laws. BOABAB was also the first, and again for some time the only NGO to actually find the victims and support their appeals, raising funds for the costs and putting together a strategy team of women's and human rights activists, lawyers and Islamic scholars contributing their expertise and time voluntarily. BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights was the 2002 recipient of the John Humphrey Freedom Award for this work. BAOBAB's work was also recently cited by the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women as an example of best practice.
If you would like to support BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights work, please send a check/cheque or international money order (preferably in Nigerian Naira, US$ or UK sterling) made out to:
a) BAOBAB / WLUML-AME Legal Defence Fund (supports the immediate costs victims and appeals process); and/or
b) BAOBAB / WLUML-AME Rights Advocacy Fund (supports the long-term work in enabling the critique of the rights in Muslim laws, as in customary and secular laws, and to work on the reconstruction of rights in law and practice); and/or
c) BAOBAB / WLUML-AME Core Funding (enables flexibility in usage - it must still be accounted for and reported on)
These should be sent to:
BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights
PO Box 73630
Victoria Island
Lagos (Nigeria)
or
BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights
PO Box 28445
London N19 5NZ
UK
or
Rights & Democracy - Droits et Démocratie
1001, boul. de Maisonneuve Est Bureau 1100,
Montréal (Québec)
Canada H2L 4A2
Tel: 514 283 6073
Fax: 514 283 3792
http://www.ichrdd.ca
NB - Check/Money order made out to ‘Rights and Democracy’ (mentioning BAOBAB as the reason for the cheque) as this Canadian NGO has kindly agreed to handle donations for BAOBAB.
