Sharia before the 2000 penal codes
Islamic law has been practiced in what is now northern Nigeria since at least the eleventh century, and it operated as the governing legal order of the Sokoto Caliphate that Usman dan Fodio founded in 1804, with some scholars tracing an even earlier Sharia presence to Kanem-Borno in the northeast S1. When Britain colonized the north in the late nineteenth century, colonial law kept Sharia-based Native and Area Courts in operation but confined their jurisdiction to personal-status matters — marriage, divorce, inheritance, and guardianship disputes among Muslims — while criminal cases were routed through the Penal Code for Northern Nigeria, a statute that absorbed many Sharia-derived elements but which the colonial administration stripped of its harshest classical penalties, such as death by stoning and amputation, on the stated ground that these were "repugnant to natural justice, equity and good conscience" S1. This personal-status jurisdiction has never lapsed: it continues today through the Sharia Courts of Appeal that the Constitution establishes in the Federal Capital Territory and in any state that creates one, with authority confined by the constitutional text itself to "civil proceedings involving questions of Islamic personal law" S2S3. What changed from 2000 was not whether Sharia applied in the north, but whether it would also govern criminal law S1
The extension to criminal law, state by state
Zamfara State's governor, Ahmed Sani Yerima, elected in the 1999 transition to civilian rule, introduced a Shari'a Establishment Law on 27 October 1999 that came into force on 27 January 2000, becoming the first state to bring criminal law within Sharia court jurisdiction S1. Other northern governors followed in quick succession, and by 2002 twelve states had adopted some form of Sharia criminal legislation: Zamfara, Kano, Sokoto, Katsina, Bauchi, Borno, Kaduna, Kebbi, Jigawa, Niger, Yobe, and Gombe S1. No additional state has adopted a Sharia penal code since that initial wave, and these twelve remain, on the most recent published counts, the only Nigerian states where Sharia courts have jurisdiction to try criminal cases S1. Muslim-majority states with sizeable Muslim populations elsewhere in the country, including Kwara and Nasarawa, faced public pressure to adopt Sharia criminal law during this period but their governments did not do so S1
Who it applies to, and how the courts are organized
In all twelve states, Sharia criminal law applies only to Muslims; state governments have not attempted to compel non-Muslims into Sharia jurisdiction, though a non-Muslim may in principle choose to bring a civil matter before a Sharia court S1. Criminal cases begin in lower or upper Sharia courts — the renamed former Area Courts — proceed on appeal to a state Sharia Court of Appeal, and from there, as with any other track in the hierarchy set out in nigeria court hierarchy, may in principle reach the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, though as of the most recent published accounts no death-penalty conviction under Sharia had yet been finally tested at that federal level S1. A convicted person has thirty days to appeal, and a state governor must personally authorize any death sentence or amputation before it is carried out, or may instead grant a pardon S1
Categories of offence
Sharia criminal law as applied in Nigeria groups offences into three categories. Hudud offences are those with penalties the classical texts treat as fixed, including theft (amputation), armed robbery (death or amputation), extra-marital sex (death or flogging), false accusation of extra-marital sex (flogging), and consumption of alcohol (flogging); apostasy, though treated as a hudud offence in some other jurisdictions applying Sharia, was not included as an offence in Nigeria's Sharia penal codes S1. Qisas and diya offences concern murder and injury, allowing the victim's family to demand retaliation in kind or to accept financial compensation instead, while ta'zir offences leave sentencing to a judge's discretion within a legislated range S1. Nigerian Sharia law also formally requires a high evidentiary standard before hudud punishments can be imposed and gives an accused person repeated opportunities to withdraw a confession, safeguards that Human Rights Watch's 2003–2004 field research found were often not observed in practice, a finding it attributed to under-trained judges, coerced confessions, and the absence of defence lawyers for indigent defendants S1
The constitutional debate
Whether Sharia courts may try criminal cases at all has been contested since 2000 and, on the most recent published accounts, remained formally unresolved. Critics of the criminal extension — a position associated in Human Rights Watch's reporting with lawyers, academics, and non-governmental organizations who made submissions on the question — argue that the Constitution's own sections establishing Sharia Courts of Appeal name only a civil, personal-law jurisdiction, and that Section 42's guarantee against discriminatory treatment is breached when only Muslims face harsher penalties, such as death by stoning, that do not exist under the Criminal Code applied elsewhere in the federation S1S3. Northern state governors and their attorneys-general have countered that Sections 4 and 6 of the Constitution give state legislatures general law-making power over any matter not reserved to the federal government, which they argue is sufficient authority to create Sharia criminal courts independent of the narrower Sharia Court of Appeal provisions, and Zamfara's governor told reporters in 2002 that "we have adopted Shari'a and Shari'a has come to stay" S1. Nigeria's federal government under President Olusegun Obasanjo took what Human Rights Watch characterized as a passive position throughout, declining to bring a test case before the courts; federal Attorney-General Kanu Agabi wrote publicly to state governors in March 2002 urging them to amend provisions he said discriminated against Muslims and breached the Constitution, a request Zamfara's governor rejected and other states largely ignored S1
International attention and continuing debate
Two cases drew sustained international coverage: Safiya Husseini in Sokoto State and Amina Lawal in Katsina State were each sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, and both sentences were overturned on appeal by their respective state Sharia Courts of Appeal S1. Human Rights Watch, while stating that it does not take a position on Sharia as a religious or legal system, documented that at least ten people had been sentenced to death by Sharia courts since 2000 and that dozens had received amputation sentences, of which only three were actually carried out, none after mid-2001, findings it attributed to a combination of international pressure, appellate reversals, and what several Nigerian Muslims it interviewed described to researchers as disillusionment with what they called "political Shari'a" rather than what they considered a more genuine application of Islamic law S1. The organization's own assessment, stated explicitly in the report, was that human rights violations linked to Sharia's criminal application — including inadequate legal representation and reliance on coerced confessions — were part of a wider pattern of due-process failures it found across Nigeria's common law courts as well, not unique to Sharia S1