in Bangladesh, Great Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, and Uganda. According to Widney Brown, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, the practice of honor killing "goes across cultures and religions." International response Honor killings are condemned as a serious human rights violation and are addressed by several international instruments. Honor killings are opposed by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 55/66 (adopted in 2000) and subsequent resolutions, which have generated various reports. The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence addresses this issue. Article 42 reads: The World Health Organization (WHO) addressed the issue of honor killings and stated: "Murders of women to 'save the family honor' are among the most tragic consequences and explicit illustrations of embedded, culturally accepted discrimination against women and girls." According to the UNODC: "Honour crimes, including killing, are one of history's oldest forms of gender-based violence. It assumes that a woman's behavior casts a reflection on the family and the community. ... In some communities, a father, brother, or cousin will publicly take pride in a murder committed to preserving the 'honor' of a family. In some such cases, local justice officials may side with the family and take no formal action to prevent similar deaths." In national legal codes Legislation on this issue varies, but today the vast majority of countries no longer allow a husband to legally murder a wife for adultery (although adultery itself continues to be punishable by death in some countries) or to commit other forms of honor killings. However, in many places, adultery and other "immoral" sexual behaviors by female family members can be considered mitigating circumstances in the case when they are murdered, leading to significantly shorter sentences. Contemporary laws which allow for mitigating circumstances or acquittals for men who murder female family members due to sexual behaviors are, for the most part, inspired by the French Napoleonic Code (France's crime of passion law, which remained in force until 1975). The Middle East, including the Arab countries of North Africa, Iran and non-Arab minorities within Arabic countries, have high recorded level of honor crimes, and these regions are the most likely to have laws offering complete or partial defenses to honor killings. However, with the exception of Iran, laws which provide leniency for honor killings are not derived from Islamic law, but from the