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You have a lot to learn about islam, and islamic court justice in muslim countries.

Women complaining of rape in muslim countries face the death penalty and lashes, directed by courts. Read about Islamic Sharia law, the religious legal code which guides many islamic countries.

Rape creates an especially difficult burden of proof for the victim. Shari'ah law only provides for punishment in cases of adultery, if both parties admit to have committed the "crime". If this is not the case, four independent witnesses have to be found; however, the witnesses must be male. In cases of rape, shari'ah rules that a rapist is to be punished with 100 lashes, if unmarried, or with death by stoning, if married, since this would then constitute adultery.

A pregnancy as a result of rape first of all counts as evidence of adultery committed by the woman. The rape victim then has to prove that she really was raped. In case the man - which is very likely - denies that he has raped the woman, the woman has to name four male witnesses to prove the rape. In case the woman does not find these four male witnesses - which again is very likely - she will be charged with slander.

For the crime of slander, shari'ah prescribes a punishment of 80 lashes. On top of that, the woman will be charged with adultery, and is thus threatened with the death penalty, if she is married. In case, she is unmarried, the "adultery" counts as immoral behaviour and is punished with 100 lashes. This is at least what the criminal code of January 2000 of the Nigerian state Zamfara says.

At the beginning of 2002, four stoning verdicts against women in Islamic states were announced: two in Nigeria, one in Sudan and one in Pakistan. Each woman had been charged with adultery.

35-year old divorcee Safiya Husaini from the Northern Nigerian state Sokoto had been reported to the police for extramarital sexual intercourse during her pregnancy. Consequently, she was sentenced to death by stoning by the Islamic court of the town of Gwadabawa on 14 October 2001. It would have been the first case ever in Nigeria of an execution under Islamic law. This sentence and this type of punishment quite clearly violates the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights as well as the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading treatment or Punishment, both ratified by the Republic of Nigeria.

At the beginning, Safiya Husaini had testified that she had been raped by a 60-year old man of her village. The man was acquitted for lack of evidence. Later Safiya, who has five children, changed her testimony and declared that her divorced husband was the father of the child.

Safiya Husaini's fate led to world-wide protests, amongst which protest by 77 MPs of the European Parliament and by a parliamentary assembly from 130 countries in the capital of Morocco, Rabat. The protests had the effect that the Nigerian Minister of Justice declared in his letter of 18 March 2002 to the governors of the federal states which had introduced shari'ah law that shari'ah was unconstitutional, because it officially was only applicable to Muslims. Furthermore, shari'ah stood in contradiction to the constitutional principle of equality. As a response, the governor of Zamfara, Ahmed Sani, who is an advocate of the strict application of Islamic law, argued that, on the contrary, shari'ah was an expression of the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion. Nevertheless, on 25 March 2002, Safiya Husaini was acquitted by the Islamic court of appeal in Sokoto on the basis of juridical procedural errors.

he protest and discussion of the case of Safiya Husaini did not lead to an overall reassessment of the application of this type of punishment for adultery, as some might have hoped. On the contrary, shortly before Husaini's acquittal, on 22 March 2002, 35-year old Amina Lawal was sentenced to death by stoning for the same "offence" by a shari'ah court in the Nigerian federal state of Katsina. The court in Bakori considered the extramarital sexual relationship of the divorced women a proven fact. Amina Lawal, too, had been reported to the police while pregnant. The charge against the man who has been named as the father was dropped. Amina Lawal had given birth to a child one and a half years after her second divorce. A women's organisation announced the appeal was to be brought before an appeals court in the beginning of April 2002. In the meantime, the government of Katsina announced that protests will neither influence the trial nor the government.

International protest helped in the case of 18-year old Christian Abok Alfa Akok in the West-Sudanese town Darfur who was charged with adultery and sentenced to death by stoning on 8 December 2001. In March 2002 the verdict was transformed into 75 lashings to be carried out immediately. Interesting here is the fact that by convicting a Christian this case stands in direct contrast to statements by Islamists that shari'ah is not applicable to non-Muslims. This is a tendency which can also be observed concerning issues such as alcohol prohibition, dress codes and gender separation on public transport.

In April 2002 a stoning verdict was reported in south-western Pakistan. Apparently, Zafran Bibi who originally had accused her brother-in-law of rape, had been convinced by the police to admit that she had committed adultery. In order to prove the rape, four male witnesses would have been necessary as well. After protests from human rights groups, the supreme court of Pakistan allowed an appeal and ordered the temporary suspension of the execution in the beginning of May. So far, death penalties in accordance with the respective Pakistani law have not been carried out. However, "lynch-law" is known to have been applied to adulterers.