NIGERIA: An Islamic appeal court in Nigeria freed a 35-year-old mother due to be stoned to death yesterday, as it emerged that a second woman convicted of adultery had been given the same sentence.
In the latest case Ms Amina Lawal Kurami, a divorced woman from Katsina state, was sentenced on Friday after giving birth outside marriage.
The sentence was passed on the day that the federal minister of justice condemned the harsh punishment imposed by sharia courts in the northern Muslim states as unconstitutional.
"We now have a critical situation, and the longer it remains unresolved the more serious it will get," Mr Clement Nwankwo, a Nigerian human rights lawyer, said yesterday.
"The government has got to take the matter to the Supreme Court and establish whether these sharia punishments are acceptable in terms of the constitution and international human rights treaties," Mr Nwankwo said.
The sharia court of appeal in the northern state of Sokoto overruled the death sentence for adultery imposed on Ms Safiya Huseini, on procedural grounds.
In October, she was condemned to be buried up to her neck and stoned to death.
Denying adultery, she told the local sharia court that she had been raped by a neighbour. Yesterday, a panel of Muslim clerics acquitted her on the grounds that her alleged crime would have been committed before sharia law was introduced in Sokoto early last year.
"Today I am happy. I thank God," Ms Huseini told reporters as she cradled her one-year-old daughter Adama, the result of her alleged adultery.
Had the original sentence been upheld, Ms Huseini would have pleaded that Adama was actually the daughter of the husband she divorced two years ago - a claim based on a Koranic teaching that pregnancy can last up to seven years.
Since strict sharia penal codes were adopted in several northern Muslim states, human rights groups have documented numerous cases of flogging and amputation.
The federal government has largely ignored the controversy for fear exacerbating the sectarian tension which claimed hundreds of lives last year. But on Thursday, Mr Godwin Agabi, the Justice Minister, said any court "which imposes discriminatory punishment is deliberately flouting the constitution".
Sokoto's governor, Mr Attahiru Bafarawa, denied yesterday that either the international outcry against Ms Huseini's sentence or the justice minister's statement had affected the appeal. "We believe in the ability of the sharia court to discharge and dispense justice to all and sundry," Mr Bafarawa said.
Human rights groups called for legal safeguards to be put in place, in spite of the Sokoto ruling.
"We welcome the decision of the court but we do not think the risk of serious human rights abuses in Nigeria is over," said Mr Michael Hammer of Amnesty International, which collected 600,000 signatures from Europe for a petition against Ms Huseini's sentence.
"The second case we have learned about today just goes to show that Safiya Huseini's case is not the legal precedent we would like," he said.
The northern states have denied that Mr Agabi has authority over them, and have challenged him to test the matter in the supreme court.