CAIRO — The woman was trying to convince the judge to spare her son who killed his sister.
“They’d been arguing when he hit her,” the woman said of her two children. “I renounce my daughter’s rights because he didn’t intend to kill her.”
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In video footage of the court proceedings, the judge appears agitated, and finally explodes: “Is he allowed to kill her because she engaged in immoral acts!? Is he Allah to judge her!? Why did he kill her?””
The court in the Faiyum province, southwest of Cairo, sentenced the man in July to hard labor and life in prison in July. However, an appeals court two months later lowered the sentence to 15 years.
This case is not an exception. Reducing sentences in family violence cases isn’t uncommon in Egypt. Such cases usually involve women victims, who are subjected to a father’s anger, a husband’s slander, a brother’s violence that too often leads to death.
A notable increase
These court rulings are based on laws that tend to reduce the punishment for so-called “honor” crimes, taking into account the supposed psychological state of the perpetrator. They also take into account family and personal circumstances, and age.
Women sometimes waive their rights as mothers of victims, as happened with the mother of a girl who was burned to death by her brother over an inheritance dispute in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura. The mother asked the court to commute the death sentence her son received.
Four women were killed because they refused to marry the perpetrators.
Edraak, a local NGO, recently released a report on gender-based violence in Egypt, which has been steadily increasing each year, including such crimes as murder, rape, sexual harassment, severe beatings and financial and sexual blackmail. Such violence sometimes pushes women, especially young girls, to take their lives.
The report classified crimes according to the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim.
85,000 women killed
Five women were killed by a family member due to a dispute over inheritance; 33 murder crimes over marital disputes; 8 murder crimes saw the killers claiming mental illness in order to escape punishment. Four women were killed because they refused to marry the perpetrators. Seventy-two girls and women were killed after severe beatings by a husband, brother, or father, according to the report.
There were nine crimes in which women or girls were murdered in what is known as honor killing, which typically refers to suspicion that a woman or had sexual relations outside of marriage.
“These crimes, known as honor killings, are not supported by evidence, but merely verbal claims by the perpetrator to reduce the sentence,” the report noted.
A United Nations report — released last month on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women — showed that 85,000 women were deliberately killed in 2023 globally. Some 60% of these murders, around 51,000, were committed by partners or other family members.
Double standard
Honor killings take up a troubling high number of motives for murder in family crimes, whether the victim is wife, sister, or daughter.
The law in Egypt tends to side with men in matters of honor. Mustafa el-Saadawy, professor of criminal law at Minya University, explained that a man can try to prove his wife was having an affair to reduce or expunge a prison sentence. Women don’t enjoy the same lowered penalties as men, he said.
A related example of Egypt’s sexist legal system is if a man files an adultery lawsuit against his wife and proves the charge, she will receive a two-year sentence. Yet, if a wife proves adultery against her husband in a legal procedure, the maximum sentence he receives is six months in prison.
