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Lord Parekh: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell-Johnston, for this extremely important debate on what is on all accounts an unacceptable and abominable practice. When we talk about honour killing it might be useful to spend a minute or two trying to understand what it entails. We would all agree that honour killing is killing that is motivated by, or legitimised in terms of, a sense of honour. Honour could be one's own honour, the honour of the family, the honour of the community or honour of one's race or nation. All killings that are motivated by some sense of honour are forms of honour killing.

They occur in all societies wherever there are strong taboos associated with certain forms of social relationship. For example, until only a few decades ago in the southern states of the United States honour killing was a common practice. A white man would kill his wife or daughter if he thought that she was having an affair with a black man and the law took an extremely lenient view of that. In Portuguese and Spanish colonies this has, again, been a fairly common practice sanctioned or mitigated by law. Such killings continue to be practised in parts of Latin America where the legacy of the Portuguese or Spanish colonial laws persist.

Perhaps I may stretch the argument just a little further. One could say, for example, that in our own country, when a white racist kills a black man for going out with a white partner because he feels that she or he has sullied the honour of his country or his race, I would be hard put as a philosopher to say that that is not a case of honour killing, because it is killing motivated by a desire to preserve the honour of England, his country or his race.

Having said that, I want to deal not with honour killing in general, because covering that would be an aim we could never realise, but with a specific form of honour killing—the kind about which all noble Lords have so far spoken—honour killing that involves killing someone on grounds such as matrimonial infidelity, a child born out of wedlock, a girl daring to demand a divorce against the customs of her community, or having relations, or even a telephone conversation, with someone of a different race.

Honour killings of that kind are not only widespread in Muslim countries, although they seem to be far more dominant there than in many others. The Turkish penal code, for example, imposed until recently lighter penalties on honour killings, and it has been only in the past couple of years, under pressure from the European Union, that the position has changed. In Pakistan there have been almost 460 honour killings every year—certainly last year. In
 
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our own country, according to the BBC News website, there have been some 12 cases of honour killings per year.

It is important to remember that killing is the final step in a ghastly story.There may have been attempts at physical harm, stabbing, maiming, beating and locking people up, forcibly marrying them off or shipping them off to Pakistan or wherever. Our condemnation therefore needs to encompass not merely the final act of terminating a life, but all the steps that lead up to it.

While condemning them, we need to ask ourselves why they take place in the first instance. As my noble friend Lord Giddens pointed out, sociological factors which have to do with a certain way of understanding gender relationships are involved. I would say that there are four of them. First, the view that children and wives are one's property, and that one may therefore dispose of them as one wishes. Secondly, a patriarchal system where women are seen as inferior and their sexuality is used as a means to subordinate them in a particular way. Thirdly and more importantly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, pointed out, there is the intense social pressure. In many communities, there is a notion of izzat or of social prestige. Prestige is given to those who observe acceptable norms. If one violates the norms, one loses one's moral authority in the community. If these norms relate to prohibiting certain kinds of relationship, you lose your moral capital or izzat by violating them. Killing someone is a way of wiping out the sense of shame or stigma. Fourthly, there is always the fear of social reprisal: a feeling that if somebody within one's family has behaved in a certain way, the whole community might act against one in ways which one might find undesirable.

I might be allowed to mention an example. When I was deputy chair and, for a while, acting chair of the Commission for Racial Equality—the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, was a dear and valued colleague in those days—a Muslim gentleman came to see me. He said that his daughter had behaved in a certain way which he found utterly disgraceful. I asked him what he was going to do. He said, "Well, I can't kill her because I will get into trouble, although if I have to do this, I will. I might get my boys to do it". When we talk about the first generation of immigrants engaging in a certain practice, let us remember that in almost all the cases that have come before the British or German courts, young brothers and sisters, born and educated here, have been accomplices in this horrendous activity. I said, "Well, if you're not going to use your bully boys to get rid of this girl, what are you going to do?" He said that he would have to send her off to the country from which they came. I said, "Why do all this? Why don't you allow this girl, who is born here, to fulfil herself in all ways possible?" He turned to me and said, "My dear professor, remember that it is a question not just of my personal self-interest or personal izzat. Two other moral factors are involved: first, if this girl behaves in this way and my family is disgraced, what will happen to her younger sisters?" I said that they might go the same way. He said,
 
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"Precisely! I do not want them to go the same way. We would like to be able to find partners within our community and we wouldn't be able to do that. Even if I were to concede your argument, there is a further difficulty. In the ethnic market, generally, one tends to depend upon an ethnic clientele. If the word were to go round that my daughter has behaved in this way, and I carry no moral authority within the community, my customers will disappear straightaway and I will starve".

I have meditated on this question almost ever since. What should have been my advice to this man, who was not motivated by the ugly considerations of self-interest or using his family to pursue self-interest but by what he thought was the moral factor: concern for his family; concern for the honour of his ancestors; or concern about how to earn his livelihood?

We have to bear all these matters in mind. That is not to excuse at all what is going on. It must be condemned, but we must try to understand why it is happening, because we will not be able to work out an effective repertoire of measures unless we know the deeper causes—the soil from which this kind of attitude springs.

I would be inclined to argue even that honour killing is not an ordinary form of killing and therefore evil like other forms of murder, but that it commits two further crimes. It perverts relations between parents and children because, if one girl has been disposed of in this way, the others live in fear. It is not just a case of an ordinary form of domestic violence; it is a case of domestic terrorism, because a tremendous amount of fear is being generated among younger members of the family. As my noble friend Lord Giddens very wisely pointed out, it is also a question of imposing a patriarchal system, imposing sexism and subjugating women. For all those reasons, it is not just a question of ordinary violence; it is a question of imposing a certain patriarchal relationship, and therefore it must be condemned.

What do we do about it? I want to suggest three or four measures which we might consider more carefully than we seem to have done in the past. First, obviously we all agree that honour killing should be banned, and the ban should be enforced vigorously. Honour cannot be a mitigating factor in this case or in racist or any other murders. This issue was first taken up by Scandinavian countries—particularly Denmark and Norway. There, if a crime of this kind is committed abroad, the perpetrator can be punished within the country of which he is a citizen.

Secondly—here, we need to be slightly careful—it is not enough to impose a ban or to have a vigorously enforced law. If a man has disposed of his daughter in this way or has shipped her off to Pakistan or wherever, he does not see himself as a criminal; nor does his community see him as a criminal—he is a martyr. He is seen as a man of great honour who is prepared to go to prison to maintain the honour of his family and the norms of his society. How do we deal with that? The situation is like that of a suicide bomber. The highest penalty that the law can impose
 
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is to inflict pain—that is, kill a man. But if a man does not fear death or pain, the law has no sanctions to impose on him. That is why I think that cultural sensitivity of some kind becomes important. Locking up such a man is not the answer, although it has to be done.

We must change attitudes in two ways. First, we must make the person realise that killing for so-called honour is really an act of dishonour. In other words, we must remove the sense of stigma associated with a particular kind of relationship and provide alternative moral sanctions so that the opposite kind of behaviour is seen as a source of honour and pride. This is how attitudes need to be changed and, in changing them, a number of agencies play an important part.

Religious authorities have an important part to play because, although this practice is generally seen as unIslamic, some of the people who practise it see it as Islamic—especially certain forms of honour killing. That is the case where, for example, Islam does not allow a woman—only a man—to marry outside the religious community. If a girl were to marry someone outside the community, she would be seen as bringing disgrace. Therefore, it is important that theologians should be able to show that there is no sanction for this kind of thing within the Qur'an or the Hadith or whatever.

Leaders within the Muslim community also have an important role to play, although I sometimes wonder whether they can really be effective in that role. To play an effective role within the community, you must have worked at the grass-roots level and you must be embedded within the community. The more that leaders become brokers between their community and the state, the more they are subjected to contradictory pressure. The closer they are to the state or the government, the further they move away from their community and the more they lack moral authority. It is striking that in this country, not only after 7/7 but even before it, if one were to look for leaders within the Muslim or any other community who were prepared to take unpopular stands—those who were prepared to go round the community, address meetings and say, "Look, this is something we cannot do"—it would be very difficult to point to more than one or two. In that deeper sense, there is a crisis of leadership within the community. But whatever leadership is available to us, we should mobilise it fully and get it to act in an appropriate manner.

Thirdly, we need protective measures for girls who have been victimised in this way. We need to protect them, build refuges and give them financial support. We also need to fund NGOs to do a lot of active work in this area. More importantly, we need to create conditions in which intelligence from within the community can be available to us. People should be prepared to talk confidentially about what is going on.

Finally, it is important to start with the schools. It is there that the girls need to have confidence and a supportive environment. It is therefore important that schoolteachers, headmasters and the school authorities in general ought to be able to educate girls
 
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and their parents, and to alert the authorities when there is the slightest danger that something might be going wrong.

4 pm

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