Nigeria's Minister for Women's Affairs said her government...

Nigeria's Minister for Women's Affairs said her government was not involved in the Miss World pageant that Spain and other countries decided to boycott because a Islamic court in her country has sentenced a woman to be stoned to death.
Speaking in her official capacity, Minister Hajiya Aisha insisted that the Nigerian federal government had no connection with, and therefore no comment to make on the beauty contest, which is being organized by private interests.
But her host at the III World Congress of Rural Women in Madrid, Spain's State Secretary for Social Affairs Concepcion Danacusa, made it clear that she "absolutely approved of the decision" by the Spanish firm involved to boycott the pageant.
The organizers were responding to a call by Spain's Joint Commission on Women's Rights comprised of lawmakers from the Senate and Congress of Deputies, who were in turn echoing an initiative approved recently by the European Parliament.
Although Nigeria's federal government has assured that the death sentence will not be carried out, Danacusa said "we have to be resolute because it's a human life that's at stake here and this is something that simply cannot be allowed".