Some 200 delegates from around the world are to meet in Stockholm from Tuesday for an international conference on combating honour killings, organisers said. "Drawing attention to honour-related violence is one aspect of our efforts to combat all forms of violence against women across a broad front, nationally and internationally," Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds and Gender Equality Minister Jens Orback, the hosts of the conference, said in a statement.
Honour killings became front-page news in the Scandinavian country in 2002 when Fadime Sahindal, a 26-year-old Kurdish woman who campaigned in Sweden against the practice herself was shot dead by her father because she had had a relationship with a Swedish man.
"Patriarchal violence against women, including violence in the name of honour, is a threat to women's lives and mental health and to equal conditions between women and men, both in Sweden and in other countries," the statement said.
"By convening an international conference, Sweden wants to combat all forms of patriarchal violence against women," it added.
Honour killings are traditional family vengeance against women suspected of being unchaste, where male relatives often believe they are acting to save their families from shame.
They are a regular occurrence in certain parts of the Middle East and Asia.
But the phenomenon is also increasingly being reported in Western countries, where it often affects recent immigrants torn between the more liberal society they grow up in and the strict, traditional upbringing their immigrant parents want to maintain.
The aim of the two-day conference is to increase the exchange of information and experiences and foster cross-border engagement and dialogue.
"That these dialogues are effective we can see, for example, through the fact that they have helped countries with which Sweden has taken up this question at a high level to amend their legislation with relation to honour murders, (or) such as in the case of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan," the ministers said.
In 2004, Sweden changed its laws to strengthen women's rights by raising the marriage age to 18 and refusing to recognise child and forced marriages entered into abroad.
Among those attending the Stockholm conference are Nilofar Bakhtiar, an advisor to prime minister on the development of women, Zorayha Rahim Sobrany, the deputy minister for women's affairs in Afghanistan, as well as UN and Human Rights Watch officials.
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