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SUPPORTING CHANGE IN NIGERIA
Brun has headed ASFQ’s project in Nigeria since March 2003, working with a team of about a dozen lawyers. The association’s attention was drawn to the West African country following news reports that Amina Lawal, a 30-year-old divorcée who had a baby out of wedlock, was to be stoned to death for adultery.He and a colleague from ASF France met Lawal’s lawyers, who gladly accepted their offer of help. “This case has taken on such proportions that we’re overwhelmed,” Brun reports them as having replied. “Nobody wants to be involved because we’re getting death threats.” Brun and his colleague joined the legal team preparing to bring Lawal’s case to the Sharia Court of Appeal, which reviews civil judgements involving questions of Islamic personal law. Her sentence was overturned in September 2003, and she was freed.
“It was an adventure,” Brun says of his first trip. “It was my first time setting foot on the African continent.” Overwhelmed by what he’d witnessed, he despaired that anything could be done to improve Nigeria’s justice system. “But when I looked more closely, I saw people’s goodwill — people working in an impossible situation who wanted to do something.”
He has since headed about a dozen missions, with financial support from CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency). One thrust of the ASFQ project is to create a local association where Nigerian defence lawyers can work together and share their knowledge of human rights. Brun and his team also visit Nigerian prisons, helping the poorest of the poor when they have been condemned to amputation, flagellation or death by stoning, under Islamic law. As in Haiti, people without the resources to hire counsel can face lengthy detention without trial, and charges sometimes amount to no more than unsubstantiated allegations.
Files, when they do exist, often only have a single page of information. ASFQ is now working on 39 cases in Nigeria alone. “These are 39 among thousands of cases we could take on,” Brun says. “We saw people who had been in jail for five, six, seven years without a trial.”
ASFQ has been involved in freeing about a dozen people since they launched the project three years ago. It has also contributed to a shift in attitudes. The attorney general for Zamfara, the northwestern state that was the first in Nigeria to adopt Sharia, has told Brun his state no longer convicts people to death by stoning. Thanks to the contributions of a group of Quebec lawyers, it’s one step forward in the fight to protect human rights in Nigeria, and the world.
Avocats sans frontières Québec www.asfquebec.com
Students can join ASFQ for $15. The non-profit organization encourages students to form campus chapters in order to organize lectures and other activities linked to ASFQ’s objectives. Students can also get involved in legal work connected to their international projects, and in the future may be called upon to participate in overseas missions.
Did You Know?
According to Human Rights Watch, an international NGO that performs human rights advocacy around the world, Haitian police are responsible for frequent arbitrary arrests, torture, beatings and excessive use of force against demonstrators. Haiti’s justice system suffers from corruption, as well as insufficient personnel, training and resources. Prisoners are held in dirty and crowded conditions that often lack sanitary facilities. Rights workers face threats and intimidation.
Since 2000, Sharia courts have gained jurisdiction over criminal cases in 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states. Although death, amputations and floggings are permitted under Islamic law, no executions or amputations have occurred since early 2002. This said, the accused in Nigeria are seldom informed of their rights or given access to counsel, and judges are often poorly trained.
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