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Nigeria: IRIN Focus on the challenge of enforcing children's rights

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]
LAGOS, 12 November (IRIN) - While Nigeria signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1991, it is yet to establish a law making the convention's provisions enforceable in its courts.

A bill prepared in 1993 could not be signed into law by the then military government due to objections raised by religious groups and traditionalists. A special committee was subsequently set up to harmonise the draft with Nigerian religious and customary beliefs.

After his election in 1999, President Olusegun Obasanjo began another attempt to give legal status to the CRC by sending a bill to parliament. However, on 30 October 2002, the lower chamber of parliament, the House of Representatives, voted to reject the bill.

The main objection the representatives raised targetted a provision setting 18 years as the minimum age for marriage. This, they said, was incompatible with religious and cultural traditions in various parts of the country, where women, especially, are given out in marriage at a younger age.

While the upper chamber of the legislature, the Senate, is yet to deliberate on the bill, most analysts think it is unlikely to deviate from the course already taken in the House. The action of the representatives has, as a result, drawn heavy criticism from international humanitarian agencies and local human rights groups.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), which made inputs into the draft children's bill, described its rejection as a huge setback for efforts to ensure that all Nigerian children exercise their rights fully.

"As one of the very first countries to ratify the CRC in the early 1990s, it is very disappointing that Nigeria is still, in 2002, debating what is the right Children's Bill to legitimate the CRC into Nigerian law," Roger Wright, UNICEF Nigeria officer-in-charge, said in a statement.

"I hope that this is only a small step backwards, and that the next steps forward to the eventual passage of the Children's Bill will be bold, and will place Nigeria where it belongs - in the forefront of children's development in Africa," he added.

Both the National Coalition on Violence Against Women (NCVAW) and the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) expressed shock, in separate statements, at the rejection of the bill.

According to Josephine Chukwuma of NCVAW, "the rights of the child should not be a debatable issue considering the high rate of child abuse in the country".

Chima Ubani, the executive director of CLO, described claims that the bill "was not in conformity with Nigeria's diverse culture and religion" as "spurious and unacceptable".

"What culture or religion would support child labour, child marriage, child slavery and all those violations which the CRC seeks to outlaw?" he asked.

Despite the outrage at the fate of the Children's Bill in parliament, few analysts expected smooth sailing for it given Nigeria's ethnic and religious mix. The more than 120 million Nigerians belong to over 250 ethnic groups. Most are adepts of Christianity or Islam while some follow traditional religions.

Early marriages are no longer widespread among women in the largely Christian south, but it is still defended by some people in the name of tradition. In the predominantly Muslim north, many women are given out in marriage before the age of 16.

In northern Nigeria this has resulted over the years in a large number of cases of vesico-vaginal fistula, a condition caused by giving birth when the cervix is not well developed. Victims of fistula, which results in incontinence, are often ostracised and abandoned. Reducing the prevalence of the ailment was one of the targets of the provision setting the age of marriage at 18.

A recent study by UNICEF and Nigeria's National Planning Commission concluded that "if a centralised military government could not secure adoption of the law, it may be even more difficult in the current democratic dispensation" due to strong cultural resistance. This prediction has been borne out by recent developments.

In March, an Islamic group describing itself as the Supreme Council for Shari'ah in Nigeria (SCSN) launched a campaign against moves by Obasanjo to domesticate UN human rights conventions, characterising them as a "plot to destabilise our country through the United Nations' covert campaign against Islam".

Led by a politician and former presidential aspirant, Datti Ahmed, it singled out the CRC, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention Against Cruel, Inhuman and other Degrading Treatment of Punishment as being against Islamic values.

It said that under Islamic or Sharia law, punishments such as death for murderers and armed robbers, flogging for drinking alcohol and fornication, and amputation of limbs for stealing, were divinely ordained. SCSN took specific exception to moves to make it illegal for girls to marry under the age of 18.

"Most girls who attend schools marry at or above the age of 18 years, but Islam recognises certain cases where the girls mature precociously and need to marry earlier," it said.

With northern Nigeria having the country's highest illiteracy rate - over 70 percent - girls enrolled in schools are very few. The vast majority face the prospect of early marriage.

The SCSN lobbied intensively among Muslim parliamentarians, stressing repeatedly that passing the bills "would entail compromising Nigeria's sovereignty, since all the conventions stipulate that once they are ratified, the provisions and obnoxious stipulations shall override and have an abrogating effect on all our domestic laws".

Musa Ibrahim, a sociology lecturer, believes the rejection of the Children's Rights Bill by the House of Representatives was essentially a victory for SCSN and other Muslim conservatives. "They worked hard at it. And it will take even harder work to overturn their victory," he told IRIN.

[ENDS]

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