Amnesty condemns use of death penalty on women

The international human rights group Amnesty International has condemned the use of the death penalty on women in Nigeria, saying it discriminates against them in certain cases such as abortion and sexual behaviour. The organisation said in a report published on Tuesday that laws which classify abortion as homicide punishable by death and the harsh punishments prescribed for adultery under Islamic or Shari’ah law operated in the mainly Muslim north of Nigeria were particularly weighted against women. It protested that one woman who was currently on death row had been charged with culpable homicide after she apparently delivered a still-born baby. The court condemned her to death after ruling that she had undergone an illegal abortion. Nigerian human rights lawyer, Dele Aremu, said agreed with Amnesty's view that certain provisions of Nigerian law discriminated against women. “Apart from the better known cases of women sentenced to death for adultery under Shari’ah, the law which classifies abortion as culpable homicide exists in our penal code and has been used to obtain convictions in the past,” he told IRIN. “This law was inherited from the British colonial government but is no longer applicable in Britain and should be expunged from our penal code,” he added. According to Amnesty International, a total of 33 people have been sentenced to death in Nigeria since President Olusegun Obasanjo was first elected to power in 1999. There are now a total of 487 prisoners on death row in Nigeria, of whom 11 are women. Some women charged and detained for capital offences have spent up to 10 years in prison awaiting trial. Amnesty International described such long delays in meting out justice as a form of “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” forbidden by the United Nations declaration on human rights. Amnesty International which opposes the use of the death penalty in general, accused 12 states in Nigeria’s Muslim-dominated north that have adopted Shari’ah law of “using the death penalty to regulate sexual behaviour.” Punishments prescribed by Shari'ah include stoning to death for adultery. The rights group said the application of such strict Islamic laws on women violated their rights to freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom of association and privacy. Amnesty International condemned what it called the “criminalisation of consensual sexual relations between people over the age of consent”. Jama'atu Nasril Islam (JNI), the umbrella body for Islamic organizations in Nigeria, responded to the report by accusing Amnesty International of carrying out an anti-Muslim campaign. "We are warning Amnesty to desist from disparaging Islam under the guise of human rights," JNI said in a statement on Wednesday in the northern city of Kano. "The issue of stoning for adultery is an Islamic injunction which applies only to Muslims and every Muslim who commits adultery is aware of the consequence of this offence if he is prosecuted," it added.