WUNRN
PALESTINE - DOMESTIC
VIOLENCE - HONOR KILLINGS - CALL FOR STRONGER LAWS AGAINST IMPUNITY
Many Palestinian women
face high levels of domestic violence. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/IPS.
- After
the brutal murder of a Palestinian woman in late July in a busy
“We have
problems with the existing laws,” Maysoun Ramadan, director of the Mehwar
Centre, the
Nancy Zaboun, a 27-year-old
mother of three, was violently killed by her husband on Jul. 30 in
In 2010, the Independent
Commission for Human Rights documented the cases of nine women who had been
killed for this same reason – to preserve “family honour” – in the occupied
Palestinian territories.
In addition to these “honour
killings,” a 2009 study published by the Gaza-based Palestinian Women’s
Information and Media Centre found that 67 percent of Palestinian women
reported being subjected to verbal violence on a regular basis, 71 percent to
psychological violence, 52.4 percent to physical violence and 14.5 percent to
sexual violence.
“When women come to the shelter,
they come in a very dramatic way. They have been abused and subjected to
different types of violence for many years. They lost their confidence. They
are sometimes aggressive, sometimes suicidal, sometimes in depression. They
have nightmares,” Ramadan told IPS.
“They are all the time
dependent on someone else and don’t believe in themselves. We try to help them
to see their capacities and to raise their motivation to break this cycle.”
In January 2011, the
Palestinian Authority (PA) passed a National Strategy to Combat Violence
against Women for the period 2011-2019. The programme aims to create work
training and empowerment programmes for women, provide social support, and
promote a legal framework to stem violence.
“Our aim and target was to
eliminate all forms of violence, no matter what kind of violence, against
Palestinian women,” Rahiba Diab, the PA’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, told IPS
from her Ramallah office.
“There is a serious commitment
from the PA to support all the issues related to women, and not to forget about
the violence that comes from the critical political situation that we’re living
under as Palestinians,” Diab said.
In May 2011, Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a presidential decree to suspend two
laws: Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code of 1960, in effect in the West
Bank, and Article 18 of the British Mandatory law of 1936, which is enforced in
Article 340 granted a man
exemption from prosecution and reduced penalties for killing his wife or other
female relative if she is caught committing adultery. Article 18 provided
leniency for the same crime if a man can prove that he acted in order to
preserve his honour or the honour of others.
But various human rights groups
have pointed to the fact that the PA left other tenets of the law in place,
which allow for violence against women to continue unpunished.
Articles 97, 98, 99, and 100 of
the Jordanian penal code deal with mitigating circumstances can be used to
justify “honour killings,” – Article 98 allows perpetrators to avoid punishment
if they can prove that they acted in a “state of rage”.
“The existing law still allows
for women to be killed, still allows for impunity,” said Tahseen Elayyan, head
of the ‘Protection of women in armed conflicts’ project at the Ramallah-based
Al Haq human rights organisation.
“In order to take practical
steps towards protecting women, especially from the so-called honour killing,
the law must be changed, and perpetrators of this type of killing must be held
accountable,” Elayyan told IPS.
According to a report released
in December 2011 by the United Nations Economic and Social Council, “high
levels of poverty, unemployment and related frustration have contributed to an
increase in tension, and ultimately violence, within families” in the occupied
Palestinian territories.
This is especially true in the
Gaza Strip, where the increasingly harsh economic and social conditions created
by the Israeli siege have translated into violence against women, according to
Mona Shawa, head of the women’s unit at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
(PCHR) in
“
She explained that while
putting laws in place to protect women against violence is a much-needed first
step, raising awareness on the rights of women and changing attitudes within
Palestinian society is crucial.
“Most important is the
community and the culture. We still have a culture which is based on
discrimination against women. We still have a culture that sees women as not
equal to men. This encourages violence against women,” Shawa said.
“Working on that as a
government, as civil society…a joint effort must be made for all this to
change.”