Marriage to 13-year-old: Islamic group wants Money power Senator left alone to enjoy his wife.
A Nigerian Islamic group has gone to court to challenged a suit filed by a government agency against Senator Ahmed Sani Yerima who is under fire over his marriage to a 13-year-old Egyptian girl.
The Registered Trustees of Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria is seeking an order of the Federal High Court to restrain any government agency from interfering with the rights of the senator.
The Islamic body propagates Islamic laws and defend the Sharia, or strict Islamic code.
Defendants in the suit are the government-backed National Human Rights Commission, National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP), and senate president and the speaker of the lower house of parliament.
Investigators of NAPTIP last May questioned Yerima, ex-governor of Muslim-dominated northwest Zamfara State, over the marriage. He is facing law suits over marriage to the minor seeing as a child abuse by local and international communities.
Yerima, 49, who provided investigators with an affidavit of marriage from the Sharia Court of Appeal in Abuja, slammed the Nigerian Child Rights Act of 2003 which he said “must have been enacted in error”.
The lawmaker said that he and his government had rejected the law — which forbids marriage to anyone under 18, when he was governor between 1999 and 2007.
The Islamic body is seeking court declaration that Yerima’s rights to privacy and practise his religion have been violated.
“We are saying that the honourable senator, as a Nigerian, fundamentally as a muslim, (that) the constitution guarantees him the right to practise his religion… the way and manner it is prescribed,” the body’s lawyer, Etigwe Uwa, told journalists after a court session on Tuesday.
“His religion allows him to marry four wives without restriction on age,” he said.
Uwa said the section of the Child Rights Act which forbids marriage of a girl under the age of 18 contravenes the country’s constitution which guarantees citizen’s rights to practise his religion.
Uwa said a Muslim has the liberty to “even marry a child in the womb of her mother.”
Judge Adamu Bello adjourned the case till October 21.
The Nigerian Senate has ordered a probe after the national rights watchdog.
Media reports have alleged Yerima paid a 100,000-dollar dowry before marrying the girl.
He faces 500,000 naira (3,270 dollars, 2,680 euros) fine or five years jail term, or both on conviction, NAPTIP officials said.
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Short URL: http://www.emnnews.com/?p=4863
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The Holly Books recognise the government of the people and the laws of the land. The Holly Books stated further that we should obey such laws.
If such Senator make love with a girl of such age, even with her consent that would be rape. I think its time we make example of such individual that such act is not welcome in Nigeria and and in any civilize society. The Nigeria law is absolute and no ONE is above the law.
There are some things in both Holly Books that you cannot do in this mordern age.
Very Immoral, wht does the law of the land says on tht ? should be an 18 year old cap.