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Note: This document is from the archive of the Africa Policy E-Journal, published
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Nigeria: Local Leadership on Women's Rights
AFRICA ACTION
Africa Policy E-Journal
May 2, 2003 (030502)
Nigeria: Local Leadership on Women's Rights
(Reposted from sources cited below)
This posting contains an important letter from the Nigerian human
rights group BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights, calling for
international supporters of human rights in that country to refrain
from counterproductive and uninformed campaigns undertaken without
consulting local groups. This call is a clear expose of the danger
of misuse of new tools of communication, and the caution can and
should be applied more generally. In order to be effective, do not
forward appeals of any kind without taking time to check the source
of the information, whether the information is up-to-date and the
action suggested still timely, and whether information is provided
on how to contact the original source,
Additional background information on the issue of Sharia and women
in Nigeria can be found in an earlier posting containing a 2002
statement by Amnesty Internatonal and BAOBAB for Women's Human
Rights at
http://www.africafocus.org/docs02/shar0204.php> Contact
information for BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights is in the posting
below.
+++++++++++++++++end summary/introduction+++++++++++++++++++++++
E-Journal Update:
The U.S. House of Representatives yesterday passed a bill
authorizing $15 billion over five years to combat AIDS, at $3
billion a year. The figure for the first year (fiscal year 2004) is
thus higher than the $1.7 billion in President Bush's budget
proposal for next year. It also includes provision for up to $1
billion a year for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria,
five times as much as the $200 million a year contained in the
president's proposal. The bill should be considered by the Senate
sometime in the next two weeks.
The White House joined a last-minute push for two conservative
amendments to the bill, ensuring their passage. One specifies that
one-third of funds for prevention (approximately $200 million a
year) be dedicated to programs supporting abstinence, and the other
that faith-based groups subsidized under the bill could refuse to
participate in programs they oppose, such as condom distribution.
However, legislators rejected, by a 288 to 130 margin, an amendment
that would have reduced funding for fiscal year 2004 to only $2
billion and removed the additional money for the Global Fund.
Note: In the U.S. legislative process, even if the higher
authorization levels are approved, a separate appropriations bill
is also required before money is available. President Bush has only
requested $1.7 billion for this purpose in his 2004 budget proposal
to Congress.
Open Letter from BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights
May 1, 2003
For more information contact Ayesha Imam at
ayeshaimam@earthlink.net
Please Stop the International Amina Lawal Protest Letter Campaigns
Dear friends,
There has 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 celebres 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 list-servs 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 made out
to:
- BAOBAB / WLUML-AME Legal Defence Fund (supports the
immediate costs victims and appeals process); and/or
- 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
- 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
P O Box 73630
Victoria Island Lagos, Nigeria
or
PMB 134,
1333A North Avenue
New Rochelle, NY 10804, USA
or
P O Box 28445 London N19 5JT UK
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Date distributed (ymd): 030502
Region: West Africa
Issue Areas: +political/rights+ +gender/women+
The Africa Action E-Journal is a free information service
provided by Africa Action, including both original
commentary and reposted documents. Africa Action provides this
information and analysis in order to promote U.S. and
international policies toward Africa that advance economic,
political and social justice and the full spectrum of
human rights.
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