The Legal Context Behind "Honor Killings."

August 24, 2007, a twenty-two year old woman marries. Tragically, her father and uncle hear a rumor that she may have had a pre-marital affair with her young beaux (now husband). Why is this tragic? The marriage took place in Jordan. Two weeks after the wedding, the young woman father lures her to a side road where her uncle murders her to save the family honor.

News of these murders reach us so often that we now understand the oxymoronic term, "honor killing." We know its context; the ugly rationale by which fathers, brothers, and husbands hack, burn, mutilate, and otherwise kill their daughters, sisters, and wives so that their friends and neighbors may nod approvingly at these honorable men, this honorable family.

In Jordan, when a man is charged with an "honor killing," a six-month slap on the wrist is not out of the ordinary. Jordan literally protects the right of its male citizens to engage in honor killings. Specifically, Jordan's penal code, Article 98 and Article 340 interact to grant men willing to chant the right mantra a 007-like license to kill.

Jordan's Law Article 340 used to exempt a man who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds or injures one or both of them from any penalty. Now it just grants such men the benefit of a reduced sentence in those instances where the state files charges. This is true, because judicial precedent interprets Article 340 in connection with Jordan Law Article 98.

What is Article 98? This is your garden-variety reduced sentence "crime of passion" statute. Essentially, it means that if a man argues that he heard a mere whisper of a rumor that his wife/aunt/daughter/sister may have been intimate with a man, and he was then enraged, he gets an automatic "get out of jail" card after a mere three to six months. Moreover, after his six-month stretch, he may ride out on a white horse free to kill again:

In 1998 Sarhan Abdullah murdered his sister because she had been raped - by her brother-in-law, as it turned out. "I shot her with four bullets in the head," he told the Ottawa Citizen three years later. "I was treated as a hero in prison." When Sarhan was released after six months, his family gave him a ceremonial sword and he rode home triumphantly on a horse. "My horse was white because I had cleansed my family's honor."

Thus, the Jordanian judicial system encourages "honor killings" through application of this second penal code provision, Article 98, which addresses "crimes of passion" and provides for lenient sentences if the killer is provoked into acting by the victim. Such statutes once existed in the United States (Until the 1970s, Texas, New Mexico, and Utah let a husband's discovery of his wife's adultery constitute grounds for justifiable homicide and judicial interpretation in Georgia created a rule allowing a man to kill his wife/daughter/fiance's lover to stop an adulterous relationship). The Texas statute read:

Homicide is justifiable when committed by the husband upon one taken in the act of adultery with the wife, provided the killing take place before the parties to the act have separated. Such circumstance cannot justify a homicide where it appears that there has been, on the part of the husband, any connivance in or assent to the adulterous connection.

Kathryn Christine Arnold discusses the effects of Jordan's Article 340 in her note, "Are the Perpetrators of Honor Killings Getting Away with Murder? Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code Analyzed under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women." Significantly, unlike with the United States (and with some Latin American countries, such as Brazil), the situation for women has degraded over time. Before 1964, the courts in Jordan specifically found the application of Jordan's Article 98 to honor killings as contrary to Jordanian law because a victim's act of adultery does not fall within the parameters of Article 98.

In 1964, however, the Court reversed all earlier precedent and allowed the application of Article 98 to honor killings. This new interpretation of the law occurred during the time of Nasser. It was a period of heightened nationalism in the Middle East. In addition, 1964 saw the formation of such entities as the Palestinian Liberation Organization. This was a period when the Arab world focused very much on Israel and felt threatened by the West.

In a lip-service effort to meet its international obligations, Jordan did amend Article 340 in 1999 (allowing women the same right as men, an unused right as can be noted from the press coverage) and in 2001 (annulling the clause that lets a man off entirely if he catches a woman in the act). This occurred in a large part due to efforts of Jordanian journalist and human rights activist Rana Husseini and others who broke the code of silence that had kept these crimes largely concealed. But I use the term lip service for a reason. The real culprit behind these legal killings is Article 98, which remains in full force and effect (the Article that frees the beasts who kill after a mere three to six months, if any jail time at all).

Men rape, they torment, they murder women throughout the world, including the United States. For a state to sanction these murder, however, is for it to lose all legitimacy. Significantly, "honor killing" in the Mddle East crosses cultural and religious lines. Thus, in a 2002 survey of Palestinians, an individual's secular or religious status had little impact on whether he or she supports honor killings.

While bills to end or penalize honor crimes repeatedly go before Jordan's parliament, they are always defeated. In November 2000, a U.N. draft resolution condemning honor killings was put to a vote; Jordan and 19 other countries abstained. In 2001, then-justice minister Abdul Karim Dughmi, said, when asked about raped women who are later killed by their own families, "All women killed in cases of honor are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die."

According to the published figures, estimates of the number of honor killings in Jordan range from a dozen a year to an honor killing every week. Amnesty Internationalreports that murders committed for financial gain are increasingly disguised as honor crimes. Moreover, at least some news sources have reported of young women blackmailed into suicide terrorism. Whether these facts are true or not, they do raise the real issue that women are placed at risk of false accusations and blackmail as a result of Article 340 and in particular Article 98.

Incidentally, marital rape remains legal in Jordan. And if a woman is raped (and not immediately put to death by a loving father, husband, or brother), the rapist can escape criminal prosecution if he marries his victim (Jordanian Penal Code 1961: Art. 308). We know the risk faced if the lady protests.

Many in Jordan protest honor killings. There are significant efforts to change the law. Nevertheless, as long as Jordan, through its legal system, condones such murderous acts, it must remain a country in violation of its obligations under international law and unworthy of the women who live under its regime.