Nigeria: Cywinski Offers to Serve Sentence for Boy

By Development Diaries
September 28, 2020

The Director of Auschwitz Memorial Museum, Poland, Piotr Cywinski, has offered to serve part of the ten-year jail sentence given to 13-year-old Umar Farouq by an Upper Sharia Court in Kano, northwest Nigeria.

Farouq was convicted on 10 August, 2020, by the Sharia Court for making derogatory statements toward Allah in an argument with a friend.

Development Diaries understands that although Farouq is a minor by Nigerian law and should not have been tried as an adult, Islamic canons regard anyone who has begun puberty as an adult.

It is also understood that Kano, a predominantly Muslim northern Nigerian state, has Islamic Sharia courts that function alongside civil courts and introduced Sharia law in 2000.

The boy’s lawyer has appealed against the sentence, saying it violated children’s rights and Nigeria’s constitution.

No date has been set for the appeal to be heard in court.

Cywinski, who urged President Muhammadu Buhari to pardon Farouq, said that he and 119 volunteers from all over the world were ready to each serve a month in prison.

‘Regardless of what he said, he cannot be treated as fully aware and responsible, given his age’, he said in a letter to President Buhari.

‘He should not be subjected to the loss of the entirety of his youth, be deprived of opportunities, and stigmatised physically, emotionally, and educationally for the rest of his life.

‘However, if it turns out that the words of this child absolutely require 120 months of imprisonment, and even you are not able to change that, I suggest that in place of the child, 120 adult volunteers from all over the world, gathered by us – myself personally among them – should each serve a month in a Nigerian prison.

‘In total, the price for the child’s transgression will be the same, and we will all avoid the worst’.

UNICEF had faulted the judgment, stating that ‘it neglects all core underlying of child rights and child justice that Nigeria – and by implication, Kano State – has signed on to’.