ANC WOMEN TO VISIT OVER AMINA LAWAL

September 12, 2003 – (Daily Trust - Abuja) The women's league of the African National Congress (ANC) has announced that it would send a delegation to Nigeria this month to meet President Olusegun Obasanjo over Amina Lawal.

A Sharia Appelate Court is currently hearing Amina Lawal's appeal against her death sentence for adultery.

The ANC Women's League newly elected president Nosiviwe Maphisa-Nqakula said that the league had passed a resolution at the end of its recent national conference that it would start a campaign to mobilise the South African public behind the growing international calls to spare Lawal's life.

"We will urge President Obasanjo to use his prerogative in law to pardon Amina Lawal," said the ANC women's leader who said that lawal's plight epitomised the suffering of millions of women around the globe.

The delegation is set to leave South Africa for Nigeria on Sept. 24.

Maphisa-Nqakula, who succeeded Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as the league's president, noted that the Nigerian constitution recognised the right to life and to a fair trial.

"It is in this light that South African women are appealing to President Obasanjo to intervene directly to ensure that these rights, which should be enjoyed by all Nigerians, are afforded as entitled to Amina Lawal.

"We are supportive of the right of all Nigerians, and anyone in the world for that matter, to exercise their right of religion, but we also submit that forgiveness is an integral virtue built in any religion and in our relationship with God," she said.

She said that the pending death by stoning of Lawal represented an acid test for the structures of the newly established African Union (AU), "whose foundations are based on ridding our continent of various human injustices and human suffering, including entrenching the rule of law and respect of human rights".

Maphisa-Nqakula, who is also South Africa's deputy home affairs minister, said that the ANC Women's League had requested South African President Thabo Mbeki to convey a message to President Obasanjo that "women's rights are human rights and that Amina's life should be spared".

Mbeki's spokesperson Bheki Khumalo said that the South African president would respond to the League's request in due course.

"The view of the president is that while Nigeria is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society, it is wrong for anyone to be stoned to death."

Meanwhile, the ANC Women's league has announced that it would stage a peaceful protest this weekend at the Nigeria High Commission in Pretoria to register their objection to the death sentence on Amina Lawal.

From: http://allafrica.com/stories/200309120642.html