Time is Running Out for Amina Lawal

It takes demands from goverments as a rule, to have any great effect on shite regimes like that in Nigeria. These so-called civilised moslem governments think it's ok to pursue their disgusting pagan rites in the name of religion! Any religion that behaves like this is a stain on humanity and should be outlawed world wide. The western world should inform Nigeria that they will be completely ostracised if they do not immediately rescind this order and pledge to legislate against any further executions of this nature, and for this 'crime'. Complete withdrawal of all trade and financial support is what it takes, coupled with a UN resolution to enforce civilised behaviour.

It seems not to be the case that the Nigerian supreme court has upheld Lawal's sentence, at least according to this article from last Tuesday's Guardian: Along with many other journalists and lawyers, I've been receiving emails urging me to add my name to an email petition calling on the Nigerian government to stop the execution by stoning of Amina Lawal, set for June 3. She was convicted of adultery by a sharia court last year, but her death sentence was postponed so that she could nurse the baby resulting from the relationship. The campaign to prevent the execution, organised by the Spanish branch of Amnesty International, has attracted several million signatures. There's only one problem: the whole thing is based on an untruth. Lawal has not been sentenced to be executed on June 3, nor on any other date. She is still waiting for her appeal to come up before a local appeals court - the June 3 date is for that - and has other avenues of appeal thereafter. Moreover, as the human rights organisation actually dealing with her case points out, every previous appeal against death by stoning for women in circumstances similar to Lawal's has succeeded. No such execution by stoning has actually been carried out in Nigeria. It's a big mistake to make, confusing an appeal date with an execution date, and obviously the organisers of the email campaign have erred spectacularly. It is a shame that other human rights groups, and civil liberties law firms and barristers' chambers, were happy to act as recruiters for signatures without checking the facts, but I can't really blame them for assuming that the information they had been given by the originators of the campaign was correct. The group Baobab for Women's Human Rights, which has issued a full explanation of the situation, argues that such a misguided, uninformed campaign, done without consulting the organisations who know what's really happening, risks being counterproductive. It can damage the credibility and efforts of local groups active in the same cause; it insults the legal system of the country involved; it angers local political forces, which could result in a backlash, causing sympathy to evaporate. A case is cited in which a Nigerian state governor brought forward a sentence of flogging just to demonstrate his contempt for international pressure. The Baobab group pleads for more thought and fact-checking by campaign originators. That's a message relevant to more than Lawal's case.