|
Court reduces 'honor killing' sentences, activists protest
(Turkish Daily News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)A Turkish court has handed down reduced prison sentences to the brother and two cousins of a victim of a gruesome honor killing, sparking angry protest from campaigners working to end the practice of honor killings.
Rights campaigners on Saturday said that penalties like those decided by a southeastern court on Friday failed to discourage the slaying of women by relatives in a traditional act to "cleanse" family honor.
In a crime that shocked the country, Semse Allak, 35, was stoned to death by family members in November 2002 in a small village in Mardin province, in the country's southeast, after she became pregnant out of wedlock.
She survived the lynching with heavy injuries and died five months later in a hospital. No one from her family claimed her body or attended her funeral, which was organized by women's rights organizations.
The 55-year-old man who got her pregnant was killed in the same attack.
In its verdict late Friday, the court in Mardin first sentenced Allak's brother to life over her killing and 27 years in jail for the murder of her lover, the Anatolia news agency reported.
The judges immediately reduced his total sentence to 20 years and eight months, on the grounds of his good behavior in court and also the fact that his action had been heavily provoked.
Two of Allak's cousins were given 17 years and six months and 12 years and six months in jail, respectively, after the court allowed for reductions in their sentences on similar grounds, Anatolia said.
Five other men were acquitted for lack of evidence.
"I find it unacceptable and unfortunate that the court passed such a verdict in a brutal murder case," Meral Danis Bestas, a lawyer for non-governmental women's rights organization KA-MER, told AFP.
"The real problem here is the attitude of the court that hears cases of honor killings and the way they sometimes protect the perpetrators of such crimes," she added.
KA-MER, based in Diyarbakir, the regional capital of the southeast, was among the Turkish and international rights organizations that took up Allak's case to press the government to introduce deterrent penalties against honor killings.
Under the infamous practice, which is widespread in southeastern Turkey, relatives convene a so-called family council and task a clan member to murder a female relative considered to have stained their honor, usually by engaging in an extra-marital affair.
In a major overhaul of its penal code in order to meet the norms of the European Union, which Turkey is seeking to join, the Ankara government last year toughened penalties for perpetrators of honor killings, which are now punishable by a life term.
But rights campaigners complain that courts hearing honor killing cases can make use of a penal code article that allows for sentence reductions for crimes considered to have been provoked.
That, in turn, has caused wide regional variation in sentencing based on the article.
An Istanbul court last year sentenced two brothers to life, refusing to reduce the sentences on the ground of heavy provocation, for killing their 22-year-old sister in 2004 after she bore a child out of wedlock.
The two brothers had first shot Guldunya Toren on the street, leaving her for dead. She survived when passers-by rushed her to a hospital on time, but the brothers managed to sneak into the hospital overnight and killed her with two shots to the head.
"There is serious injustice when it comes to honor killings," Urun Guler, a project director from the Ankara-based Flying Broom, a women's rights organization, told AFP.
"We still live in a male-dominated society where women are still seen as chattel. That still shows in how the penal code is interpreted and implemented," she said
[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
|
TMCnet LOGIN
Webinars
