Honour killing

Honour killing is a cultural phenomenon when men kill female relatives to redeem the family's name. These murders are socially sanctioned and often pardonable by law; they are usually denied and classified as suicides and accidental deaths. The crimes may have hidden motives - men wanting to get rid of their wives to marry again, or fathers trying to hide their rape of their own daughter.

Finding a female relative in a so-called "objectionable" or "compromising" position with another man, often meaning that the two are merely alone together in the same room, is often used to justify honour killings. Perhaps most worrying, so-called fake honour killings are surging to the point of being an "epidemic", Ms Khan says. Fake honour killings are when a man kills a woman, usually a relative, to cover up the real reason he has murdered another man.

The UN conservatively estimates that 5,000 women a year are killed this way, mainly communities with Bedouin origins: Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, and also in the Indian subcontinent.

In Lebanon, one of the most westernized countries of the region, an average of one woman per month is killed by a close male relative who says she has soiled the honour of the family by committing adultery or engaging in pre-marital sexual relations.

Since 1994, there have been around 5,000 cases of honour-related crimes in the region surrounding the Pakistan capital, Islamabad. In 2001, at least 226 women in the southern province of Sindh were killed - usually by their husbands or brothers - while some 227 honour-related killings took place in the Punjab.