ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the extreme end of the honour based violence and abuse spectrum: honour killing. A review of the legal elements concerned with honour killing will help to expose complexity of the phenomenon. Existing guidelines do not incorporate specific indications on matters peculiar to honour based violence and honour killings, and so it would be useful for judges to have these factors conveniently compiled into a single document when sentencing such offenders. There are several relevant issues when sentencing the perpetrators of honour crimes, such as a cultural defence, mitigations for young offenders and deterrence, all of which have been suggested to the Sentencing Council to consider when drafting new guidelines for honour based violence and honour killings. It insisted that the State Party should continue its efforts to effectively enforce the anti-honour killings laws and other relevant laws criminalizing violence against women and enforce prohibition of the application of Qisas and Diyat laws to so-called honour based crimes.
