A parliamentary committee for law, justice and human rights proposed amendments to the Pakistan Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code that would mean death sentence or life term for the person involved in honor killing. The minimum punishment for the crime would be a seven-year jail term. Honor killings are rampant in the rural areas of Sindh and the deeply conservative northern regions. The government has taken steps to end the practice but such incidents keep happening. The law, if enacted, would strengthen the government's efforts to end this practice.
Not being a European, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea of the death penalty for premeditated murder. Pakland's court system, however, doesn't seem to even open a case unless someone formally files a complaint. No complaint, no crime, regardless of how dead wifey or sister might be. I could be wrong in my interpretation, of course; correct me if I'm wrong. But if I'm not, it would seem that the state has the duty to take up the cause of the dear departed, who's no longer capable of speaking up. To coin a phrase:
"A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course,
"And no one can talk to a corpse, of course..." |
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