Woman Faces Death By Stoning 'after Weaning'

An Islamic court in Nigeria upheld a sentence of death by stoning on a woman convicted of adultery yesterday, defying a government ruling that the death penalty for adultery is unconstitutional.

The judgment has therefore paved the way for a clash with the federal courts on the validity of the Islamic law applied in northern states, an issue which has already led to thousands of deaths in communal riots.

The Islamic high court in Funtua, Katsina state, rejected Amina Lawal's argument that her conviction for adultery was invalid because the child born as a result of the liaison was conceived before sharia law took effect in Katsina.

Her lawyers added that the divorced mother-of-three had not been legally represented at the original trial before a village court in March, and that she did not know she might be condemned to death.

Ms Lawal, who was clutching her eight-month-old daughter, wept at the ruling and dozens of spectators cheered and shouted "God is great".

The court ruled that she cannot be executed until she has finished breastfeeding her baby daughter, Wasila, which the judge said would not be before January 2004.

Before that there is likely to be a highly charged legal battle over the constitutionality of sharia law, which has long been applied to civil and family cases in Muslim regions of Nigeria but has recently been expanded to ban alcohol and impose severe penalties for theft and adultery.

It has the apparent blessing of most of the population in the north, where most people are Muslim. But it has met with deep hostility from Christians and people from other parts of the country living in the north.

More than 3,000 people have died since 1999 in riots against the introduction of sharia in northern cities with sizeable non-Muslim populations. Any attempt by Islamic courts to override the federal supreme court is likely to provoke even greater suspicion and enmity.

The federal government has already declared aspects of sharia law unconstitutional, including the death penalty for crimes such as adultery and the severing of limbs for theft.

The supreme court is likely to agree, particularly as many sharia trials fall well short of the prescribed standards of justice.

But the governors of northern states have made political capital from pressing for more stringent Islamic laws, modelled on those in Saudi Arabia and Sudan, promising the vast numbers of poor that sharia will end corruption and improve their lives.

Any attempt by the government to block the more extreme elements of sharia is sure to meet with violent protests by some of its millions of supporters.

Ms Lawal is not the first woman sentenced to death for alleged adultery.

Safiya Hussaini, who was convicted in similar circumstances last year, won an appeal on the grounds that she had sex out of wedlock before sharia law took effect.

But a teenage single mother was given 100 lashes early last year for adultery, even though she argued that she was raped by three men.

The court said that Bariya Ibrahim Magazu could not prove that the men forced her to have sex.