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(Lagos) A 50 year old man has been sentenced by a Nigerian court to death by stoning after he admitted in court he has had sex with men.

The man, whose name has not been made public, had been charged with sodomy and brought before a Sharia or Islamic court in northern Nigeria. Following a brief trial he was acquitted.

But, according to a UN report, the judge then asked the man if he had ever had sex with another man. When the man answered yes the judge convicted him of sodomy and sentenced him to death.

Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on arbitrary executions has called for an immediate review of the case by the Nigerian government.

"Sodomy cannot be considered one of the most serious crimes for which, under international law, the death penalty can be prescribed," said Alston in a statement after an official tour of Nigeria. "The punishment is wholly disproportionate."

Alston said he interviewed the man in prison during a fact-finding visit, but added that he had stumbled upon the man by chance while investigating death row in Kano prison.

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country, with 140 million inhabitants. It is split between Muslims in the North and Christians in the South.

Since 2000, 12 of Nigeria's northern states have adopted Sharia codes for their courtrooms. Under Islamic law, gay sex is punishable by death.

Gay men are routinely rounded up in Nigeria, often only as a result of third party gossip.

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[ 02 August 2005: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

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"Sodomy cannot be considered one of the most serious crimes for which, under international law, the death penalty can be prescribed," said Alston in a statement after an official tour of Nigeria. "The punishment is wholly disproportionate."

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Nice. It's a "crime", but not punishable to *that* degree. Wow. What an advocate.

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Since 2000, 12 of Nigeria's northern states have adopted Sharia codes for their courtrooms. Under Islamic law, gay sex is punishable by death.

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Originally posted by Stargazer:
Heph I was just going to say that but due to the nature of the possible resulting backlash, decided not to. But alas, here I am. Repeat, I do not think adopting Sharia Law is even remotely good for Canada.

No apologies will be made regarding my position.

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Stargazer, why would you be expected to apologize for holding a position? I also think having multiple legal systems is a disaster. This is Canada. Everyone is welcome so please join us. If you don't like aspects of our legal system, address them through the appropriate channels, but you aren't free to start your own legal system outside of ours.

Edited to add:

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Nice. It's a "crime", but not punishable to *that* degree. Wow. What an advocate.

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To be fair to the UN guy, he might have worded his statement awkwardly. I didn't read his statement to mean that he, personally, thought homosexuality was a crime, just that "homosexuality is not a crime people should be executed for." That's not the same thing as stating homosexuality should be treated as a crime.

I would think that the most urgent matter is to make homosexuality a non-capital crime. Then to make it not a crime at all.

[ 10 July 2005: Message edited by: EFA ]

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"Sodomy cannot be considered one of the most serious crimes for which, under international law, the death penalty can be prescribed," said Alston in a statement after an official tour of Nigeria. "The punishment is wholly disproportionate."
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Nice. It's a "crime", but not punishable to *that* degree. Wow. What an advocate.

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Heph:

The guy's job title is "special rapporteur on arbitrary execturions", and that is likely the capacity in which he was speaking. Presumably, commenting on the unfairness of the sex laws themselves falls outside of his jurisdiction.

I know that might sound cold, but I would guess that UN diplomats aren't really at liberty to start criticizing things beyond their area of authority.

[ 10 July 2005: Message edited by: voice of the damned ]

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Anyone seriously interested in helping should make contact with feminist or gay groups in Nigeria and ask what they can do to support them (not direct them) -- there always is quite a lot that is already being done. (One way of making contact might be through that UN rapporteur.)

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With laws like that, I'd be surprised there are *any* feminist or gay groups that can be contacted in Nigeria (I'm not saying there aren't any, I'm just wondering how they can exist.) How can we assume they have a voice, an outlet, an organised entity at all?

The hot-headed self-righteousness of those who don't, actually, care about what goes on in Nigeria must take precedence over saving real people's real lives, plus a shaky but improving central government, simply because saving lives and saving Nigeria is just not good enough for self-righteous and privileged North Americans unless it is happening tomorrow.

Right.

This has been demonstrated time and time again on babble with regard to Nigeria, and yet the self-righteousness (I won't use the worse terms) keeps up.

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With laws like that, I'd be surprised there are *any* feminist or gay groups that can be contacted in Nigeria (I'm not saying there aren't any, I'm just wondering how they can exist.) How can we assume they have a voice, an outlet, an organised entity at all?

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Or, if it isn't too much work, we can make the effort of googling "lesbian and gay rights Nigeria" and see what comes up. Oh, look -- there's a page from Behind the Mask: A Website on Gay and Lesbian Affairs in Africa and find some contact info for Alliance Rights Nigeria and its president, Erelu Oludare Odumuye.

On this website, we can read accounts of serious and widespread human rights abuses against LGBT in Nigeria -- and, if you care to read it, you can get a sense of the political undercurrents that give rise to this sort of atrocity (see the link to "Unholy Alliance - How Power Fuels Homophobia in Nigeria").

You can also see that LGBT Nigerians are fighting back. The website tells you about "Support Project in Nigeria (SPIN) is an LGBT welfare organisation with over 400 registered members spread across the 6 geographical zones of Nigeria". You can read that LGBT Nigerians sent Team Lagos to the Sydney Gay Games in 2002, and that they organized strange-but-fun social events like a Miss Gay Nigeria 2004/05 (that's for men dressed as women).

brebis noire, on the left of this page there is also a link to Behind the Mask web pages for pretty much every country in Africa, including Ethiopia, that can give you more detailed information than your Ethiopian acquaintance did.

As skdadl points out, self-righteous reactions by Westerners who don't actually know anything about the situation of persecuted LGBT in Nigeria don't really help anyone on the ground. Worse, they reinforce the credibility of homophobic Africans (usually men; often political leaders) who say that there is no homosexuality in Africa, that "authentic" Africans are homophobic, and that gayness is a Western form of corruption. That surely does NO good to African LGBT who live in countries where homophobia gets wrapped in the flag.

Let me just give a big fat WORD to skdadl, with whom I always seem to be tag-teaming on this issue. Her comment bears repeating:

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Anyone seriously interested in helping should make contact with feminist or gay groups in Nigeria and ask what they can do to support them (not direct them) -- there always is quite a lot that is already being done.

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Heph and iPod, Philip Alston, the special rapporteur, was speaking from his perspective as an international law monitor. International law is created either by treaty (there are no international treaties that explicitly protect LGBT rights, though some human rights treaty implementation bodies have interpreted rights to privacy or rights to be free from sex discrimination to protect gay men and lesbians against state persecution) or by custom (i.e., the overwhelming majority of countries' governments acknowledge that a particular practice is intolerable). Since there is no treaty or international custom that would give this gay man an enforceable claim against his government to argue that it's illegal to criminalize same-sex sex, Alston was trying to save his life by using an existing rule of international law, recognized in both custom and treaties that Nigeria is party to: that countries should work toward abolition of the death penalty, and that, in countries where the death penalty is legal, it must be reserved for only the most egregious crimes. Since the Nigerian government is the only entity that can actually protect this man, Alston was arguing for this man's life based on a rule that the Nigerian government acknowledges. If Alston were to say, "International law prohibits the criminalization of gay sex", he would be mistaken, the Nigerian govt wouldn't listen to him, and the man on death row would be no safer.

The more countries abolish criminal penalties for gay sex, the closer we'll get to being able to make a credible international-law argument that not only is the death penalty an excessive punishment for the "crime" of same-sex sex, but that it is a human rights abuse to criminalize SS sex at all.

That being said, sharia sentences for sexual activity by women and gay men provide a pretty damn compelling argument that religion -- any religion -- should not be given force of law. As we all know, evangelical Christian groups would love to recriminalize gay sex in Canada and the US (and with a few new Bush appointees to the US Supreme Court, we can expect they'll try).

[ 10 July 2005: Message edited by: puzzlic ]

But I do have the faith. We have been watching this story for so long, and we've seen before that people on the spot are smarter than we are. I can never remember the details, and I am lazy ... oh, I said that.

So it really inspires me to see you come along and slay so many dragons so well. Brava.

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Originally posted by puzzlic:
Sorry, what is it that you're saying is self-righteous? Apart from the ridiculous length of my post, that is

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Nawww, that was not aimed at you... But now you've gone and made all *my* work superfluous. Ohy well, here it is anyway...

Canada's Immigration Dept says this:

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Nigeria: Situation of homosexuals and their treatment under sharia law...

This update of NGA39088.E of 17 June 2002 on the treatment of homosexual men in Nigeria, reveals that male homosexuality remains a criminal offence and that attitudes towards homosexuality persist largely unchanged... In spite of this, however, some reports suggest that it is possible to live as a homosexual, though discreetly, and not without some risk to one's safety... Evidence found by the Research Directorate of punishment for male homosexual acts is in fact limited to the Nigerian states that enforce sharia law...

Still, although Nigeria has at least two active gay rights organizations..., disapproval of homosexuality remains strong at the individual level..., within the Christian church and Muslim communities... and within the media...

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One of my fave sites, Behind the Mask has this to say:

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At present, Alliance Rights Nigeria has 467 registered members, though there are thousands of 'sagba's' (the word sagba refers to homosexuals in Nigeria) in Nigeria, that are indifferent in becoming members. It is hoped that this will change in the future.

Alliance Rights Nigeria's vision centres on the elimination of the belief amongst literate and non-literate Nigerians that homosexuality is a taboo and alian to African culture.

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Alliance Rights Nigeria strikes me as similar in many ways to JFLAG (from Jamaica) — a rights organization that had to keep its location secret and its membership anonymous, for security reasons.

Might as well live in a backward hell-hole like Virginia.

[ 10 July 2005: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

But then life becomes so frustrating, eh? You find that you are arguing your own politics from several directions at once.

Cherie Blair and Laura Bush come on TV, talking about how terrible things are for women in Afghanistan, and of course we know that that is true, and suddenly feminists here are staring at you and saying, Well? Why aren't we with Cherie Blair and Laura Bush?

Gaaaah!

It makes life a lot easier to know for sure that we aren't with them because RAWA aren't with them, and RAWA were far and away the most heroic resistance group to come through the Taliban years, some of the best reporters too.

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Originally posted by puzzlic:
As for the links themselves -- how did I ever live without google?

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A 50 year old man has been sentenced by a Nigerian court to death by stoning after he admitted in court he has had sex with men.

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And we are thinking of adopting aharia law here because.... why WAS that again?

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Because the only people to whom it could apply have to ask for it?

Because it won't be used for criminal law?

More Nigerian gays face death by stoning

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Less than a week after a United Nations official criticized Nigeria for sentencing a gay man to death by stoning two other gay men have been dragged into court to face the same sentence.

The pair, identified in the local media as Yusuf Kabir, 40, and Usman Sani,18, are accused of sodomy. They appeared Wednesday morning in a Sharia or Islamic court in the northern town of Katsina.

Police said they were arrested while having sex in a public washroom on June 19 although today was their first court appearance.

Prosecutors were unable to provide any witnesses in court. The judge, instead of dismissing the case as would be done in most western countries when witnesses to a crime are not provided ruled that the prosecution had until August 3 to find corroborating evidence of the crime.

In the meantime the two men will remain in prison.

Since 2000, 12 of Nigeria's northern states have adopted Sharia codes for their courtrooms. Under Islamic law, gay sex is punishable by death.

Press reports say that more than a dozen people have been convicted to death by stoning but none of the sentences has been carried out.

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Twenty-two Democratic members of Congress have protested death sentences handed out to men convicted of "sodomy" in Nigeria.

[...]

The letter was organized by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee; and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), the senior Democratic woman on the House Committee on International Relations and the Whip of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Rep.Tom Lantos (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Committee on International Relations; and Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ), the senior Democrat on the International Relations Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations, were among the members signing the letter.

"We strongly urge you to intervene in this case to assure that this man's legal and human rights are respected and defended," the letter states. "We share the view of the special rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights who recently ended a visit to Nigeria with a call for the death penalty to be dropped in cases of homosexuality and for "immediate measures to review the entire proceedings" of this man's case in particular. "

The letter goes on to note: "We have been very supportive of your efforts to transform Nigeria from military to civilian rule, and we applaud in particular the role your country is playing to help foster stability in West Africa. We also continue to be supportive of U.S. aid to Nigeria, but we must tell you that Americans are also entitled to expect that countries that benefit from our humanitarian and economic assistance will not tolerate practices that are so clearly in violation of basic human rights."

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:

Because the only people to whom it could apply have to ask for it?

Because it won't be used for criminal law?

Because we already allow other groups the very same thing and it would look a little discriminatory to deny only Muslims?

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There has never been substantial support or argument in favour of a prohibition on the practice of Sharia law by independent arbitration or private tribunal, I don't think. That'd be silly. Independent arbitration by religious tribunal is legal because there's no way to stop it. Objections have been raised to the suggestion that such arbitration should be attributed any special status or recognition under law, or exemption from inherent conflict with the law of Canada, but that's quite a bit different from objection to the existence of such arbitration at all.

I don't see why it is was hard to agree that the Special rapateur badly mangled that statement, and that whatever his intentions were, the statement explicitly [Edited to change implictly to explicitly] sanctions state repression of gay people, not just in Nigeria but everywhere. I am absolutely sure that it was not intended to have the meaning that it does and sleepy-head should have coffee before making future statements.

This statement should have been gently retracted in favour of another more sensible one. That is if he really cares and is trying to do more than remove a brief from his desk.

Sharia is not a universal code of law that is applied in the same manner everywhere, kinda like US state laws differ widely, while all being bound within the consitution, which has also been variously interpreted. That said this whole problem with Sharia in Ontario is the result of some silly bumpkin's allowing some religions the right to have faith-based aribtration at all.

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Originally posted by Yst:

Independent arbitration by religious tribunal is legal because there's no way to stop it.

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A sailent reality, but should it be authorized and legitimized by the state and given a legal status?

[ 02 August 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Originally posted by swallow:
Possibly because that would do absolutely nothing to help gay peopel in Nigeria? Possibly because it would almost certainly lead to more anti-gay oppression in Nigeria, not less? Yeah, that seems like a pretty good reason.

Honestly: the starting point for a discussion here should be "How can we effectively help to make things better."

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