Well, I think we have to distinguish between how provocation was historically applied by our courts and how it's being applied now and under the direction of the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal. No longer would these things fly in the courts: killing of a wife for infidelity, killing an individual because of a perceived homosexual advance, or the use in the honour context. There's no air of reality in those circumstances and it's been rejected the three times that it has been put forward.
What we should, perhaps, be doing if we want to look at the provocation section is, as some critics have said, calling a spade a spade and writing in the legislation exactly how we want this legislation to apply. I was looking at some comments from March 23 in the House where there were some comments by the government that other common-law jurisdictions have eliminated and repealed provocation altogether. That's simply not true. If you go and look at the U.K. legislation, you'll see it's true that provocation was abolished but it was replaced with another section called “loss of control”. In that section, it says it can apply to words and to comments. They have to be serious. That's set out in the legislation. But what they actually do in the legislation is what maybe we should do here if we want this bill to apply to honour killings.
That legislation says the fact that a thing done or said constituted sexual infidelity is to be disregarded. They've actually applied it through legislation to the specific targeted facts, narrowed, that they want to address and not necessarily limited the application of provocation to exclude some rare, unusual but perhaps justifiable applications in the future.