Girl's flogging in Nigeria violated pact - UNICEF
otasco otanda
01/23/01
Girl's flogging in Nigeria violated pact - UNICEF
By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 23 (Reuters) - UNICEF, the United
Nations Children's Fund, condemned on Tuesday the
flogging of a teen-age Nigerian mother for having had
premarital sex, saying it violated a key international
treaty Lagos had signed.
``UNICEF's position is clear: Under no circumstances
should countries use flogging, lashing or any other
type of violence as punishment for children,'' Carol
Bellamy, the agency's executive director, said.
``UNICEF calls on responsible authorities in Nigeria
to investigate this incident and make the amendments
to its domestic legal system necessary to guarantee
that this incident is never repeated,'' she said.
Seventeen-year-old Bariya Ibrahim Magazu was beaten in
the northern Nigerian state of Zamfara on Friday as
punishment by Muslim authorities for having become
pregnant outside marriage. She said her pregnancy was
the result of rape.
Magazu was given 100 strokes of the cane before a
large crowd in front of the Islamic sharia court in
Gusau, a town in Zamfara.
Bellamy said there were very few nations anywhere in
the world whose justice systems allowed the flogging
or lashing of children under the age of 18.
WORLD CONSENSUS SEEN
The almost universal ratification of the 1990
Convention on the Rights of the Child means there is a
global consensus on protecting children from violence
and sparing them from forms of cruel, inhuman and
degrading punishment, UNICEF said.
``Nigeria has ratified the Convention on the Rights of
the Child, which prohibits the use of flogging as a
punishment for children,'' it said.
``Nigeria has undertaken the obligation to implement
the principles of the CRC and ensure that the nation's
legal order conforms to its principles,'' Bellamy
added.
On Tuesday, a Nigerian women's human rights group,
Baobab, gave eyewitness accounts of the flogging of
Magazu, who gave birth to a boy last month and is
still breast-feeding.
``The lashes were on her buttocks,'' Baobab
spokeswoman Ayesha Imam said in a statement sent to
Reuters in Lagos. ``She was crying. There did not
appear to be any sign of a doctor present.''
Human Rights Watch condemned the flogging and urged
the Nigerian government to protect those accused from
``the arbitrary meting out of extreme and unacceptable
punishments.''
``Nigerian officials rushed to impose this cruel and
unusual punishment and ignored the court's review of
Magazu's conviction and sentence,'' said Regan Ralph,
who heads the group's women's rights division.
There has been no official reaction from the
government of President Olusegun Obasanjo. Although he
has been trying to redress human rights abuses under
past military rulers, Obasanjo is walking a tightrope
over the sharia issue.
In 1999 Zamfara state blazed a trail for northern
Nigerian states by adopting the strict Muslim sharia
legal system, which is opposed by many non-Muslims.
The declaration of sharia law in some northern states
led to Christian-Muslim fighting in March and May 2000
in the northern city of Kaduna in which hundreds of
people died.
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