If Amina Lawal is to die, so will the 2002 Miss World...

If Amina Lawal is to die, so will the 2002 Miss World beauty pageant. The world's most popular beauty contest will face its biggest crisis in its 40 years of existence if the death-by-stoning sentence against the 30-year-old Nigerian single mother is upheld by an Islamic appeals court on September 25.
Even Miss World President Judith Morley is not sure if the contest will take place, although she is not committing herself.
More than 20 countries called for a boycott of the contest, and quite a number of individual beauty queens declared they will not go, but Miss Uganda 2002, Rehema Nakuya plans to travel to Abuja, where the pageant is due to be held on November 30, 2002.
"Boycotting the contest will not benefit anybody. We have to go there and face the issues," Nakuya told The New Vision by telephone. "We can't run from the issue. We have to go there and do something. We have to fight it, but we have to be there."
Nakuya, 23, is a medical doctor and a Muslim.
"I'm a medical doctor and believe in preserving life. How can I support an action that instead destroys it?" she asked. "What's going to happen to her child when she is put to death? And in any case, where is the man who did this to her?"
Under the Katsina State Sharia Law, a woman who confesses to having a child outside wedlock is automatically guilty of adultery, which is punishable by death.
The co-ordinator of Miss Kenya, Leakey Odera, said her country supports the boycott: "There is no point in sending our participant if Lawal is executed, because the world would think we are backing the inequitable executions by the Islamic courts," Odera was quoted as saying.