Beyond Law: The Fight Against Honour Violence

By Eleni Zampelis

Athens, Greece

A protest against systemic injustice and calls for societal reform (Duncan Shaffer / Unsplash).

The overturning of Kuwait’s Article 153 is a milestone. But while legal reform is essential, it is not sufficient. The deeper fight is against the social and cultural norms that allow honour-based violence to persist globally.

For Payzee Mahmod, a women’s rights activist whose sister Banaz was brutally murdered in a suspected 'honour killing', the overturning is a great success but not a solution. Laws may be amended, but attitudes run deep, and the prevalence of such violence globally is proof of the epidemic of violence against women specifically.

Article 153, a vestige of a medieval mindset, accorded lighter punishment to men if they killed a female relative in defending the family honour. Campaigners are welcoming its repeal as a step towards gender justice. However, such legislation remains in place in much of the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America. Even in highly developed systems of law, there are cultural "justifications" for violence against women. Banaz's case is a moving reminder of how these attitudes spill across borders. Murdered in the UK by her own family for choosing whom she was going to marry, her example demonstrates that honour violence is not only a cultural practice but one that is promoted through institutional practices such as legal and bureaucratic systems that ultimately fail to protect marginalised groups, thereby making their vulnerability structurally embedded. The horror was not so much violence, but institutional complicity: police and society were unresponsive to Banaz’s cries for help. Despite repeated complaints of violence and threats, the authorities did nothing and failed to offer her adequate protection, a testament to systemic failure or refusal to recognize honour-based violence as genuine and imminent danger. This was not a one-off failure, but indicative of legal systems that are culturally blind and lack policy response in dealing with such cases. Thus, it is clear that without policy that guarantees the unalienable rights of humans, systematic oppression is actually cultivated. Banaz's lesson is universal: court systems themselves cannot overturn deeply embedded ideology if the institutions themselves are characterized by the same blind spots.

Globally, nations grapple with conflicts between cultural heritage and human rights. In Pakistan, the 2016 amendments to legislation on honour killing were made to close loopholes for killers to be pardoned by their own families. But the practice goes on, with dozens of women killed by it each year. In Jordan, where honour killings have been normal for centuries, efforts to toughen legal sanctions have been resisted by conservative forces. Even in Western democracies, parallel legal and social systems sometimes set up in immigrant communities will tend to recreate the same norms as in their home country, raising difficult questions about cultural relativism vis-à-vis universal human rights. 

Nevertheless, progress is being made. In Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, there have been movements advocating criminalizing domestic abuse to end violence based on gender. However, their success is often negated by conservative Islamic groups in society. A solution is not merely a matter of stopping sporadic acts of violence, but also of managing women's agency and enforcing strictly liberal gender norms.

It is thus much more difficult to tackle honour violence than it would be to purely change legislation. Education, economic empowerment, and narrative change are all needed equally. People must be persuaded to change their notions of honour, manhood, and justice. Tragedies like Banaz’s must be remembered as not just tragedies, but as warnings, as evidence of how societies fail women when they cling more fiercely to old notions of honour than to human life. Kuwait's removal of Article 153 is a remarkable victory, but it must be considered merely the beginning, not the end. The ultimate test is to translate legal victories into tangible change in the value of women's lives and to challenge the belief that allowed such pieces of legislation to be enacted in the first place.