Government to toughen penalties for honour-related crimes

The government will submit a bill that will make it an aggravating circumstance if an offense is motivated by honor.

This is what Minister of Immigration and Integration Kaare Dybvad Bek (S) tells Berlingske.

- There should be no doubt that the individual's freedom and civil rights are more important than the family's understanding of whether you are dating the right person or dressing properly, he tells the newspaper.

It is already an aggravating circumstance if the motive for a crime is due to the victim's ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation.

The new thing is that an honor-related motive will now also help to increase the sentence, if it is up to the government.

The proposal from Kaare Dybvad Bek was also part of the Commission for the Forgotten Women's Struggle's recommendations from the beginning of the year.

In the past 20 years, Danish courts have convicted people of honor killing in two cases. That is, murders where the motive for killing the victim was related to honor.

The first happened in 2005, when 18-year-old Ghazala Khan was shot and killed by her brother.

According to Kaare Dybvad Bek, there may be an undercount. He bases this on, among other things, the number of women with minority backgrounds who stay at shelters, he tells Berlingske.

But he also believes that it is important to send a signal that honor-related crime is unacceptable, he says.

This is not the first time that the government has been inspired by the Commission for the Forgotten Women's Struggle's proposal.

In May, it was announced that the government was ready to find a model so that people who have been subjected to honor-related violence and social control can, in special cases, opt out of a caseworker if they are not comfortable with the person in question.

That proposal also arose from the commission's report.

/ritzau/