The High Court in Blantyre has set October 10 to start hearing the appeal case of Nsanje-based Eric Aniva.<\/p>\n
Aniva was convicted in November last year for Indulging in Harmful Practices contrary to Section 5 of Gender Equality Act of 2013 for allegedly sleeping with over 100 women and children, potentially infecting them with HIV, a virus that causes Aids.<\/p>\n
According to a petition of the appeal which we have seen, Aniva claims that the lower court erred in convicting and sentencing him, which he said caused failure of justice.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe lower court erred in holding that kulowakufa <\/em>is a harmful practice as defined by the Gender Equality Act when there is no evidence supporting the court\u2019s reasoning and conclusion. The lower court erred in convicting the applicant based on a caution statement when the prosecution failed to prove an essential element of the case,\u201d he argues.<\/p>\n During the trial, last year, Aniva opted to exercise his right to remain silent after the Magistrate Court sitting in Nsanje found him with a case to answer for the offence.<\/p>\n His lawyer, Michael Chipeta, raised a number of issues, including that the law which was used to charge Aniva was only three years old against a practice that was over 100 years old and that the state did not bring any victim of Aniva\u2019s crime.<\/p>\n However, Principal Resident Magistrate Innocent Nebi, who was presiding over the case, convicted and sentenced Aniva to two years imprisonment with hard labour and Chipeta said Aniva is appealing against both conviction and sentencing.<\/p>\n Aniva was arrested following President Peter Mutharika\u2019s directive to have him arrested for the offence but he claims that he was being hired by senior women to sleep with the girls and women as part of ritual cleansing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The High Court in Blantyre has set October 10 to start hearing the appeal case of Nsanje-based Eric Aniva. Aniva was convicted in November last year for Indulging in Harmful Practices contrary to Section 5 of Gender Equality Act of 2013 for allegedly sleeping with over 100 women and children, potentially infecting them with HIV, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54160,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54154\/revisions\/54160"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}