Iran’s supreme court has confirmed a sentence of death by stoning against a woman convicted of adultery in the southern city of Shiraz, a newspaper reported on Saturday.The woman identified as Afsaneh R., was also given a second death sentence for murdering her husband with the help of a man identified only as Reza, who had an affair with her, Etemad Melli newspaper reported.

The report said the supreme court had in August confirmed verdicts first issued in April, but gave no reason for the delay in making the decision public.

It said Reza had also been sentenced to 100 lashes for having an illegitimate relationship and 15 years in jail for collaborating in murder.

Under Iran’s Islamic law, adultery is still theoretically punishable by stoning, which involves the public hurling stones at the convict buried up to his waist. A woman is buried up to her shoulders.

An Iranian rights group said in July that eight women and one man had been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery over the past few years and urged the Islamic republic to halt their executions.

In August, the judiciary said it had scrapped the punishment in Iran’s new Islamic penal code, whose outlines have been adopted by the parliament but its details are yet to be debated by MPs before final approval and coming into effect.

The judiciary also said stoning sentences against several convicts had been suspended and commuted to either lashes or jail terms but it was not known if any of the nine convicts were among those whose lives have been spared.

In July 2007, the Islamic republic drew international outrage by stoning to death a man convicted of adultery, Jafar Kiani, in a village in the northwest of the country.

AFP

The incidents of violence against women including honour killing are on the rise in the city.

The crime data of November showed that seven women were murdered, two committed suicide, 20 were kidnapped, two girls were sexually assaulted and 10 cases of torture on women were reported to police. More than 12 women were deprived of their valuables during different incidents of mugging, dacoity, car snatching, car theft and burglary.

The murder cases were reported to Sadiqabad, Taxila, Westridge, Pirwadhai, Airport and other police stations. The incident of honour killing was reported to Sadiqabad police, in which a man had allegedly shot his sister dead over her marriage dispute. Someone beheaded an unidentified woman in the limits of Taxila Police Station. Five women were injured during different incidents of robbery, dacoity and brawls.

A women living in the limits of Taxila Police committed suicide by shooting herself over a family dispute on November 26. Another woman committed suicide by taking poison in the limits of Gujar Khan on November 23. One woman was killed in Chontra when the gun of her brother-in-law allegedly went off accidentally and she died on the spot.

Unknown outlaws allegedly kidnapped a woman from the limits of Kallar Syedan police station. The brother of the victim informed police that unidentified persons had kidnapped his sister Gulnaz Bibi, a student of Bachelor Degree, on November 28 and they were demanding Rs 1.5 million ransom for her safe release.

Influential people allegedly sexually assaulted two teenaged girls in the limits of Kahuta and New Town police stations. Though the police have registered the cases but the accused are still at large.

One Asmat Zhura told Banni police that her relatives had allegedly tortured her over a property dispute. Police have registered the case and investigations are under way.

Authorities in the southern Iraqi city of Basra have admitted they are powerless to prevent ‘honour killings’ in the city following a 70 per cent increase in religious murders during the past year.

There has been no improvement in conviction rates for these killings. So far this year, 81 women in the city have been murdered for allegedly bringing shame on their families. Only five people have been convicted.

During 2007 the Basra security committee recorded 47 ‘honour killings’ and three convictions. One lawyer in the city described how police were actively protecting perpetrators and said that a woman in Basra could now be murdered by hired hitmen for as little as $100 (£65).

The figures come despite international outrage which followed The Observer’s coverage of the death of 17-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader, who was murdered by her father last April in an ‘honour killing’ after falling in love with a British soldier in Basra. The 4,000 British troops stationed in the city since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 withdrew to the airport last September.

Rand Abdel-Qader was killed after her family discovered that she had formed a friendship with a 22-year-old infantryman whom she knew as Paul. She was suffocated by her father then hacked at with a knife. Abdel-Qader Ali was subsequently arrested and released without charge.

Rand’s mother, Leila Hussein, who divorced her husband after the killing, went into hiding but was tracked down weeks later and assassinated by an unknown gunman. Her husband had told The Observer that police had congratulated him for killing his daughter.

Seven months after the murders, the problem of these killings in Basra has become worse, according to lawyers. Ali Azize Raja’a, an Iraqi prosecutor who has represented the victims of 32 ‘honour killings’ since 2004, said that, despite accumulating sufficient evidence to prove who was responsible in each murder, he had won only one case.

He said that the greatest issue was the decision by police to release suspects. Seven in 10 of those thought to be responsible for such a killing have left the city, with little attempt made to track them down.

The father of Rand is also understood to have left Basra. He was held by police in connection with his daughter’s murder for only two hours. A local businessman who described the actions of Rand’s father as ‘courageous’ is believed to have given a considerable sum of money to him and his two sons, who disowned their mother after she objected to Rand’s killing. Raja’a said that when he was approached by Leila over Rand’s case, his family was threatened by relatives.

Another Iraqi lawyer, who requested anonymity, said that some fathers had started to hire professional hitmen to carry out ‘honour killings’ which were then covered as ’sectarian murders’. He said: ‘The life of these women isn’t higher than $100. You can find a killer standing in any coffee shop of Basra, discussing prices of a life as if he was buying a piece of meat.’

Mariam Ayub Sattar, an activist in Basra, said that any woman caught speaking to a man in public who was not her husband or a relative was considered a prostitute and punished. A fortnight ago three women were burned with acid while walking through a market in Basra after stopping to speak to a male friend, Sattar said.

Nine of the 12 voluntary organisations helping women in Basra have closed down since the US-led invasion.

The Women’s Rights Association in Basra was forced to close down after death threats were made following the murder of Rand’s mother last May. Two women from a voluntary organisation who had been helping her to hide from her husband were also injured.

Alia’a Obeidi, the organisation’s president, said that one of her colleagues was killed while driving to work and, fearing for her family’s safety, she later moved to the Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights said that it was working on new projects to end gender discrimination in the country. ‘We try to make a difference by teaching students at schools about gender equality, but it only will be possible when parents don’t teach the opposite at home,’ said Hameed Walled, senior official in the Ministry of Human Rights.

Guardian

She was a gutsy student leader known for hunger strikes and provocative street theater at universities across the country, exposing the plight of India’s beleaguered lower castes. He was a worldly gadfly with a passion for ending nuclear proliferation and exposing environmental crimes.They fell in love in Iraq nearly 18 years ago while campaigning for peace before the Persian Gulf War. Their romance bloomed, and within three months they were engaged.

But their marriage a year later ushered in another war: In tying the knot, they openly defied India’s deeply entrenched taboos against inter-caste marriage. Anita Pharti, now 42, came from the Dalit caste, still known as untouchables, the lowest in India’s social order. Her husband, Rajeev Singh, 45, is a Rajput, traditionally a landholding caste that had for centuries ruled over Pharti’s peasant community.

“My family was completely aghast,” Singh recalled, sitting with Pharti in their cozy living room, where they have helped clandestine inter-caste couples elope. “My father said he wouldn’t let it happen. But I felt so sure about Anita. We were able to fight back. But we were the lucky ones. Many still get murdered for this.”

Even though India legalized inter-caste marriage more than 50 years ago, newlyweds are still threatened by violence, most often from their families. As more young urban and small-town Indians start to rebel and choose mates outside of arranged marriages and caste commandments, killings of inter-caste couples have increased, according to a recent study by the All India Democratic Women’s Association.

In the past month, seven so-called honor killings have targeted inter-caste couples. In the latest incident, a Hindu youth in Bihar was beaten by villagers this week and thrown under an oncoming train because he sent a love letter to a girl of a different caste. The attacks continue despite decades of government decrees intended to dismantle the bulwark of caste, which is widely seen as the glue of traditional Indian society but is considered among the most corrosive features of the emerging new India.

“The recent rise in violence actually shows that the younger generation — especially women — are slowly gaining individual freedom in marriage. But the older generation still cling to the old ways where marriage is still a symbol of status, not emotional love,” said Shashi Kiran, a lawyer in India’s Supreme Court who married outside her caste and is handling several honor-killing cases. “It shows a society still in transition and wrestling with deep change.”

As part of a controversial incentive for inter-caste couples to marry, the government recently began offering $1,000 bonuses. That’s nearly a year’s salary for the vast majority of Indians. Smaller cash payments first started in 2006 after a Supreme Court ruling in which judges described several high-profile honor killings as acts of “barbarism” and labeled the caste system “a curse on the nation.”

“The government is again deeply concerned over the low rate of conviction and high rate of acquittal of those people involved in incidents of atrocities on people belonging to lower castes,” said Meira Kumar, the minister for social justice and empowerment, who is from a lower caste. “This is not the only way to end the caste discrimination, but one has to start somewhere.”

B.R. Ambedkar, the country’s most famous Dalit leader and chief architect of the Indian constitution, called for an end to caste consciousness more than 60 years ago. He promoted inter-caste marriage as the most practical way to blur caste lines and render them irrelevant.

Despite India’s egalitarian veneer, there remains an invisible separation between the country’s upper and lower castes that lasts from birth to death. Meals are rarely shared between Brahmins and Dalits, the top and bottom brackets of the caste system, which also includes a constellation of in-between castes. Restaurants are often self-segregated along caste lines. Some Hindu temples are off-limits to certain lower castes. Even among minority Christians — presumably a casteless religion — some graveyards are stratified by caste.

For most Indians, opportunities in education, employment and marriage are still determined by the ancient social hierarchy of caste. Despite economic growth that has helped create a burgeoning middle class, sociologists say the caste system still represents the highest barrier to social mobility. Fewer than 5 percent of India’s 1.1 billion people are Brahmins, while more than 70 percent come from lower-level castes.

Some of the most recent honor killings are being investigated in small towns outside New Delhi. Several involve runaways from different castes who were slain for eloping. This summer, a father turned himself in to police after using a knife to kill his 19-year-old daughter for marrying a Dalit factory worker.

There have even been cases overseas. In January, Subhash Chander, 57, an Indian immigrant living in Chicago, set a fire that killed his pregnant daughter, his son-in-law and his 3-year-old grandson. He told investigators that his daughter had married a man from a lower caste without permission. Similar cases have been reported in England and Australia.

Encouraging inter-caste marriages would break down discrimination and weave together millions of caste-segregated families, creating a new generation of “India’s version of Obama,” said Prem Chowdhry, author of the book “Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples.”

But rather than pay inter-caste couples, she believes the government should help organize a countrywide discussion on inter-caste marriages. Popular culture should be the venue, she said, with soap opera plots, Bollywood actors and famous cricket stars used to start a dialogue. “Caste has to be discussed more openly in modern India. We shouldn’t be so arrogant as to deny one of our main weaknesses. Helping inter-caste marriage take off in India would be a major attack on the caste system,” Chowdhry said. “For the future of India, it could mean much more time and energy to focus on lifting the majority of the country out of poverty.”

Star Tribune

Police say the body of a seventh woman shot execution-style has been found in violence-wracked Chechnya.Regional Interior Ministry officials say the body was found Friday outside of Enginoi, a village northwest of the capital Grozny.

Police say the woman aged roughly 25 was shot in the head, doused with a flammable liquid and torched.

Officials aren’t saying whether the killing was connected to that of six other women found shot dead earlier this week. Five were Chechens.

Rights groups say the women may have been victims of honor killings — killings by relatives who disapprove of their lifestyles or conduct.

Chechnya has been ravaged by two separatist wars in the past 14 years, fueled largely by an Islamic-inspired insurgency.

International Herlad Tribune

Six women found shot dead in the mainly Muslim region of Chechnya in southern Russia may have been killed by male relatives in the name of family honour, human rights activists said on Thursday.

Police ruled out robbery as a motive because the women’s jewellery had not been stolen. All the women, who were discovered on Wednesday, were aged between 20-30 and had been shot in the head.

The deaths could have been “honour killings”, said Natalya Yestemirova, an employee at human rights group Memorial in the regional capital Grozny. The victims of “honour killings” are often accused of adultery or engaging in taboo homosexual acts.

“I don’t rule out that these women were killed by their relatives for inappropriate behaviour,” Yestemirova said.

Police found three of the women’s bodies in Grozny, another two in a quiet lane outside the city and the sixth in a field near a road. Two of the dead women were sisters, police said.

The United Nations has estimated that more than 5,000 people die each year through “honour killings”, mainly in Muslim countries and communities.

Chechnya’s commissioner for human rights, Nurdi Nukhazhiyev, said this was the most likely reason behind the deaths.

“Unfortunately there are women who have forgotten the code of conduct for the mountain people,” he said. “Men, who consider themselves offended, will sometimes resort to lynching.”

Since 1994, Russian soldiers have fought radical Islamists during two wars in Chechnya which is now under the control of its pro-Kremlin President Ramzan Kadyrov.

Some analysts say that in return for quelling rebel attacks the Kremlin has let Kadyrov implement some Islamic rules, such as telling women to don headscarves and long skirts if working in government offices, and imposing periodic alcohol bans.

There is a history of beatings and killings in the name of family honour in Chechnya.

In 2006 a video circulated across the internet of Chechen policemen beating a pregnant woman with branches and hosepipes, shaving her head and covering her scalp in green paint. They accused her of sleeping with a man who was not her husband.

In the same year, local media reported two other women were also beaten, for flirting with a taxi driver.

Javno

The daughter of Fatemeh Haghighat Pajouh, who was executed in Iran for killing her temporary husband, spoke out on November 26 against her mother’s execution.

Iran on November 26 hanged nine men and a woman, Pajouh, convicted of murder in Tehran’s Evin prison.

Pajouh’s daughter, Zahra, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that her mother saved her from being raped, then fought with her father Mohammad and killed him in 2001.

“I was asleep. I woke up with a start and found Mohammad on top of me. He ripped my clothes. I couldn’t scream. He closed my mouth with his hand. Then, my mother came and pulled Muhammad off me and took him outside,” Zahra said.

An Iranian official on November 26 said Pajouh had killed her husband by “cutting him into small pieces.”

In majority Shi’ite Iran, men are permitted to marry women on a temporary or short-term basis.

Amnesty International says Iran executed 317 people in 2007, more than any other country except for China.

Radio Free Europe

In a second suspected case of ‘honour killing’ within a fortnight in the district, a 17-year-old girl was killed allegedly by

her brother for eloping with her lover who belonged to a different community.

Police arrested Shamshuddin who “confessed” to killing his sister Shamshida for “tarnishing the family’s name”, the police said.

Shamshida, daughter of Hanif Tyagi, had eloped with her lover Pradeep, 22, on November 15 and went to Hardwar district, police said

When she returned home last evening, Shamshuddin allegedly killed her by slitting her throat in Charthawal town, police said.

Police said the youth had “confessed” to the crime saying he and the family didn’t approve of Shamshida’s relationship with Pradeep.

The body has been sent for post mortem. Additional police have been deployed in the town which has been gripped by tension after the killing.

Farzana, 18, who had eloped with her lover, was murdered allegedly by her brother at Sarai Rasulpur village in the district on November 14 in another suspected honour killing.

Times of India

In Pakistan, one in five women has to suffer from violence of her husband while during last year 354 incidents of gang rape and 370 of rape took place similarly 143 women were burnt alive and 692 have committed suicide. According to a survey issued about women, a total of 2,226 served in jail last year. In South Asia, approximately 0.15 million women were smuggled for prostitution, while in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India each of six young girls died of negligence and discriminatory attitude. The incidents of women killing increased by 17 percent and domestic torture 77 percent in 2007 as compared to 2006. In 2006, honour killing claimed 565 while in 2007 it increased to 636. According to a police report 600 women were killed in the name of honour killing in NWFP.

The Post

A young man killed his 35-year-old stepmother with an axe in the name of honour, due to her alleged illicit relations with a local man, in the Shahdra Police precincts on Tuesday.

The victim has been identified as Najma Bibi (35), who was a resident of Okara. Police sources said that the deceased had contracted a second marriage a couple of years ago with Rehmat Ali, who was a hairdresser and running a shop in his locality. They said that it was the second marriage for both, and after marrying each other, they had seven children between them. They also said that Najma Bibi had eloped with an unidentified local about three months ago.

They said that on the day of the incident, she returned home after which she had an argument with Rehmat, but Rehmat surrendered and left the house. Rehmat’s son, Salamat, who was at home, heard the exchange and when his father left the house, he used an axe to kill his stepmother. Police said that Salamat locked the house from the outside and ran away, along with the murder weapon. However, some locals saw him leaving with the axe and informed the police. Police officials moved the body of the deceased to the city morgue. They have also registered a case and investigating the matter. Seperately, the body of a 22-year-old unidentified woman was recovered from Chamman Park in the Harbanspura Police precincts.

Police officials said that the victim was found sitting along the wall of a college located near the Chamman Park. They said that locals informed the police, who after reaching the scene found that the woman was dead. They said that the apparent cause of death was gunshots, as she had been shot at least eight times. They also said that the deceased was wearing a costly dress, which led to the indication that she belonged to a reasonably rich family.

Harbanspura Police officials said that they believed that the initial evidence pointed towards honour killing, however, they had not ruled out rape or kidnapping yet.

Daily Times