Global Policy Forum

Geneva - More and more women and girls are being slain in "honor killings" around the world, a U.N. human rights investigator said Friday. Asma Jahangir, a prominent Pakistani lawyer and activist who serves as U.N. rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, called for governments to prosecute the killers, usually relative of their victims.

Honor killings, in which women are slain for perceived violations of a family's moral code, have been reported in Bangladesh, Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey and Uganda, according to her annual report presented to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. "The perpetrators of these crimes are mostly male family members of the murdered women who go unpunished or receive reduced sentences on the justification of having murdered to defend their misconceived notion of 'family honor,' " Jahangir said. "The practice of 'honor killings' is more prevalent although not limited to countries where the majority of the population is Muslim," she said in a 37-page report.

But renowned Islamic leaders and scholars have condemned the practice and said that it has no religious basis, she said. On the order of clerics, an 18-year-old woman was flogged to death in Batsail, Bangladesh for "immoral" behavior, according to her report. In Egypt, a father paraded his daughter's severed head through the streets shouting: "I avenged my honor."

"It is reported that in Pakistan around 300 women are killed every year for crimes of 'honor'," said Jahangir, who is also chairwoman of Pakistan's national human rights commission. "Only a handful of the perpetrators are arrested and most of these criminals receive only token punishment. Jahangir said she was working closely with U.N. special investigators on violence against women and on the independence of judges and lawyers to address incidents of honor killings.

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