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FUNTUA, Nigeria, July 8 (AFP) - A young woman who has been sentenced to death by stoning for bearing a child out of wedlock was to make her case before judges in an Islamic appeal court in this northern Nigerian town on Monday.

Amina Lawal, 30, will appear before the Funtua Upper Sharia court, where her lawyers will begin giving evidence to support their attempts to get the sentence quashed.

Speaking to Nampa-AFP in her home village before the hearing, Lawal said she was hopeful that she would win her appeal with the help of a lawyer from a women's rights group, and said she planned to get remarried if acquitted.

No verdict is expected in the case Monday.

Cradling her eight-month-old daughter Wasila, whose surprise arrival led to Amina, a divorcee, being denounced as an adulterer, the softly-spoken 30-year-old said she expected to be exonerated.

"I plan to get married after winning the appeal. I have a suitor who wants to marry me, but I told him to wait until the case is over," she told Nampa-AFP last week in her home village of Kurami, 230 kilometres (140 miles) south of Katsina.

In March, judges in the small country town of Bakori sentenced her to be stoned to death for adultery after the twice-divorced mother-of-two became pregnant for a third time.

Amina was the second Nigerian woman to be sentenced to death in this way since the mainly Muslim northern states in Africa's most populous country began reintroducing Sharia law in January 1999.

As with her predecessor in the limelight, 25-year-old Safiya Husseini, Amina's case was taken to appeal by lawyers paid for by women's human rights groups.

The groups have proved adept at mobilising international opinion behind the sentenced women, and Safiya was eventually freed on a technicality after a storm of protest from around the world.

Last month, the appeal court in Funtua granted some concessions that gave Amina and her defence team grounds to hope that she might follow Safiya in being cleared and be allowed to rebuild her life.

The judges overturned a ruling commanding her to present herself at the court every two weeks, and said that whatever the result of her appeal, Amina would not be stoned until January 2004, to allow her to wean little Wasila.

For her defence team this was a sign the court was inclined to look favourably on her appeal, which was based on the medically dubious grounds that Wasila's embryo had lain dormant in her womb.

"I know that my daughter is not a bastard," she said, sitting in front of the mud-brick house she has shared with her mother, father-in-law, brother and sister-in-law since her second divorce in June 2002.

"I left my last husband, Garba Magajin-Aska, with a two-month-old dormant pregnancy, which stirred and began to grow eight months after the divorce," she told Nampa-AFP, speaking in her native Hausa.

"The appeal court seems to be fair. Not like the court which passed the sentence. The judge did not give me the chance to explain myself."

After hearing the defence case on Monday, the court will adjourn to make a stark choice.

Either it can order Amina to return to her village in shame only to return six months later to be publicly stoned to death.

Or it can exonerate her and allow her and her children to settle with a new husband, relieve her family of the burden of supporting her and regain the respect of her community. - Nampa-AFP

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