LAHORE, Pakistan (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A court in Pakistan sentenced a mother to death on Monday for burning her daughter alive as punishment for marrying without the family's consent. 
  
 Parveen Bibi confessed before a special court in the city of Lahore to killing her daughter in June for what she said was "bringing shame to the family". 
  
 Police said 18-year-old Zeenat Rafiq married Hassan Khan and eloped to live with his family a week before she was killed. 
  
 The court sentenced Rafiq's brother Anees to life in prison after the evidence showed her mother and brother had first beaten her, before her mother threw kerosene on her and set her on fire. 
  
 After Rafiq's murder in a poor district of Lahore, none of her relatives sought to claim her body, police said, leaving her husband's family to bury her charred remains after dark in a graveyard near the city. 
  
 Violence against women is rampant in Pakistan, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Citing media reports, it said there were more than 1,100 "honor killings" in 2015. 
  
 Pakistan's parliament passed legislation against "honor killings" in October, three months after the murder of outspoken social media star Qandeel Baloch. Her brother was arrested in relation to her strangling death in July. 
  
 Perceived damage to a family's "honor" can involve eloping, fraternizing with men or other breaches of conservative values. 
  
 In most cases, the victim is a woman and the killer is a relative who escapes punishment by seeking forgiveness for the crime from family members. 
  
 Under the new law, relatives can forgive convicts in the case of a death sentence, but they would still have to face a mandatory life sentence. 
  
 (Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit news.trust.org) ||||| LAHORE, Pakistan - A prosecutor says a court has sentenced a woman to death for burning her daughter alive for marrying a man of her choice in eastern Pakistan. 
  
 Abdur Rauf said judge Chaudhry Ilyas in eastern Lahore on Monday convicted Parveen Bibi of burning to death Zeenat Rafiq a week after her marriage to Hassan Khan last June. 
  
 Rauf said the court sentenced Anees Rafique to life in prison for helping his mother kill his 18-year-old sister. 
  
 Defense lawyer Shahid Iqbal said the son had no role in the killing and was wrongly convicted. 
  
 Authorities say Bibi brought Rafiq back home with a promise of celebrating the wedding but burned her alive instead. 
  
 Neighbors in the congested, working-class neighborhood in the sprawling eastern Pakistani city came running when they heard the screams, but family members kept them from entering the house, said Nighat Bibi, who lives nearby. 
  
 The police eventually arrived and found the charred body near a staircase. They arrested the mother soon thereafter. 
  
 STR/AFP/Getty Images 
  
 The victim’s husband, Hassan Khan, told reporters the two had been “in love since our school days” but the family had rejected several marriage proposals, forcing them to elope last month. He showed an affidavit of consent signed by his wife before a magistrate. He also showed cellphone photos of a smiling Zeenat wearing a red dress. 
  
 Khan told Pakistani media that his wife had only returned to her own family for a visit after being assured it would be a celebration of her marriage, and she would not be harmed. He said he agreed reluctantly to let her return 
  
 Akhtar, the a local police official, said Parveen confessed to killing her daughter with the help of her son Ahmar. He quoted the woman as saying “I don’t have any regrets.” Another police officer, Ibadat Nisar, said the body showed signs of beating and strangulation. 
  
 For generations now in Pakistan, they’ve called it “honor” killing, carried out in the name of a family’s reputation. 
  
 The killers routinely invoke Islam, but rarely can they cite anything other than their belief that Islam doesn’t allow the mixing of sexes. Even Pakistan’s hard-line Islamic Ideology Council, which is hardly known for speaking out to protect women, says the practice defies Islamic tenets. 
  
 It doesn’t matter: in slums and far-off villages, away from the cosmopolitan city centers, people live in a world where religion is inextricably tied to culture and tradition, where tribal councils can order women publicly punished, and a family can decide to kill one of its own, even to avenge a wrongdoing committed by someone else. 
  
 In the vast majority of cases, the “honor” killer is a man and the victim is a woman. 
  
 She is a sister who falls in love with a man not of her family’s choosing. She is a daughter who refuses to agree to an arranged marriage, sometimes to a man old enough to be her father. She is a wife who can no longer stay in an abusive marriage and divorces her husband. 
  
 He is a brother who cannot bear the taunts of other men brought up as he was, believing that women are subservient and must be kept in the shadows, their worth often measured by the number of sons they can produce. He is a neighbor who doesn’t think his friend did anything wrong in taking his sister’s life. He is a father who is angry about her killing not because she is dead, but because her death will reveal her “shame” to other members of the family and beyond. 
  
 As modernity pushes against tradition, Pakistan has seen an increase in the number of women and girls killed in the name of honor: in 2015, 1,184 people died, only 88 of them men. The year before, the figure was 1005, and in 2013 it was 869, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. The true numbers are believed to be higher, because many cases go unreported. 
  
 The killings have fueled a growing public outrage at the practice, and a chorus of voices saying that there is no honor in killing - only dishonor. They are working to close the legal loophole that lets killers go free. 
  
 A proliferation of television channels and newspapers has brought the horrors of girls strangled, burned alive or shot in the head out of the secrecy of the home and into the public. 
  
 But for many who have been fighting this kind of killing, it is the mindset of the boy who could kill his sister, or the parent who could kill a daughter, that has to be understood and changed. ||||| LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — A prosecutor says a court has sentenced a woman to death for burning her daughter alive for marrying a man of her choice in eastern Pakistan. 
  
 Abdur Rauf said judge Chaudhry Ilyas in eastern Lahore on Monday convicted Parveen Bibi of burning to death Zeenat Rafiq a week after her marriage to Hassan Khan last June. 
  
 Nearly 1,000 women are murdered each year in Pakistan by relatives in the name of family honor. 
  
 Rauf said the court sentenced Anees Rafique to life in prison for helping his mother kill his 18-year-old sister. 
  
 Defense lawyer Shahid Iqbal said the son had no role in the killing and was wrongly convicted. 
  
 Authorities say Bibi brought Rafiq back home with a promise of celebrating the wedding but burned her alive instead. |||||

Write a summary.
– A Pakistani mother who burned her daughter to death because she disapproved of the teen's marriage now faces death herself. A judge in eastern Lahore convicted Parveen Bibi of killing Zeenat Rafiq a week after the 18-year-old's unapproved marriage to her boyfriend, reports Reuters. Authorities say Bibi lured the girl home after the marriage on the pretext of throwing her a celebration, reports the AP. Instead, she beat her and doused her with kerosene, then set her ablaze. The girl's brother helped in the attack and has been sentenced to life in prison. A local police official quotes the mother as saying, "I don't have any regrets." As her daughter burned to death, she was seen running out of her house screaming, "I have killed my daughter for misbehaving and giving our family a bad name," per AFP. CBS News reports an uptick in the number of women and girls killed by family members in the name of honor as modernity and tradition go head-to-head. Nearly 900 such deaths were reported in 2013, then more than 1,000 in 2014, and nearly 1,200 in 2015, according to the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan, though the numbers are thought to be higher due to underreporting. (A popular Pakistani singer stopped his show mid-song to rescue a girl who was being harassed.)