Campaigners have voiced concerns over a growing number of non-Muslims using Islamic law to resolve legal disputes in Britain despite controversy over the role of sharia law.

MORO: A man namely Hussain Bux Brohi shot dead his 17-year-old sister, Bakht Naz Brohi and a youth identified as Jalal Brohi over Karo-Kari allegations in village Qatal Shah in the jurisdiction of the Sudhoja Police Station on Saturday.
After the incident, the accused surrendered himself before the Sudhoja Police.

Police reached the spot and handed over the bodies of the deceased to their heirs after conducting their autopsies from the taluka hospital Moro.

Saudi Arabia has a serious child-marriage problem.

It's emblematic of the nation's struggle between modernity and traditional Islam. But the lives of thousands of little girls are being destroyed as the Saudi government ponderously debates a solution.

Child marriage has been acceptable, even encouraged, in many Islamic states since the religion was born. After all, among the prophet Muhammad's dozen wives was Aisha, who is believed to have been 6 or 7 years old when the two were married.

AFP - A Lebanese man has been arrested in northern Lebanon for killing his sister earlier this week in what authorities described as an honour killing, a security official said on Friday.

"The 24-year-old victim was single and apparently had a boyfriend," the security official told AFP. "(Her brother) admitted shooting her twice in the head to cleanse the family honour."

Seven women were killed in the Palestinian territories because of "honor killings” in the first month of the year 2010. These news were released by Palestinian human rights organizations interested in women's issues, but according to my sources, this statistic was falsified and the real number of women who were murdered, only in the cities of Ramallah and Hebron since the beginning of the year 2010 has exceeded 13. The sources confirm that these seven women, who were registered in the statistics of human rights organizations as victims of “honor killing”, were left in public streets and in fields after being killed and there was no chance for the perpetrators to hide the crime.

FOR my column title today, I am stealing the title of the classic account by Betsy Hartmann and James Boyce of the year they spent in a small Bangladeshi village in the early 1970s.

The violence in their title refers to the violence done to the soul by the grinding poverty and hopelessness they found in the Bangladeshi countryside. But I have always thought the term a very fitting one to describe the violence done to the souls of women in our society, and it is in this sense that I use it today.

London (Special Correspondent) - The participants of a seminar called upon the government to take effective measures to check Honour killings and forced marriages. The seminar, held here the other day to mark the International Women's day, was organized jointly by APLAW, OXFAM and Garden Court Chambers.

Baroness Pola Uddin addressing the seminar said that despite myriad changes occurring elsewhere in the society the status of the women continued to remain in jeopardy. Incidents of honour killing and forced marriage are very common providing ample testimony to their miserable position. She said violence against women is quite uncalled for and intolerable.

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court held the city police commissioner responsible for the safety of the husband, whose wife was allegedly killed by her parents for marrying out of the caste.

It was a case of honour killing and the High Court was furious about the fact that Delhi Police failed to prevent the killing of the woman allegedly by her parents for marrying outside their caste.

A girl befriends boys. What could be more normal and ordinary? Yet for doing just that a Turkish teenager was reportedly buried alive by her father and grandfather.

This recent piece of news has been met with shock and outrage worldwide. Crimes such as this, however, are in no way exceptional.

Indeed, a court in Arizona is currently hearing the case of a man accused of running down and killing his daughter whom he allegedly considered too “Westernised.” The United Nations estimates that 5,000 women are murdered by family members each year in so-called honour killings around the world. When women are seen as the carriers of a family’s honour they become vulnerable to attacks involving physical violence, mutilation and even murder, usually at the hand of an “offended” male kin and often with the tacit or explicit assent of female relatives.

Despite the Pakistani government’s few efforts to improve the women’s situation, physical and sexual violence, honour killings, forced marriages and structural inequalities within the society still make Pakistan one of the worst countries in the world in terms of gender gap according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2009. Pakistan is at the lowest bottom of the ranking among Asian countries and at 132 out of 134 countries. Economic empowerment also stood at 132, health at 128 and political empowerment at 55. The situation is getting worse, as its ranking was 127 in 2008 also Asia’s worst ranking in terms of gender based gap.