In United Nations (UN) human rights reporting and analysis, ‘honour’ has been systematically conflated with ‘honour-related violence’ (HRV). However, honour and HRV are not the same thing. In this article I examine contemporary UN human rights discourses around honour. I argue that these discourses are underpinned by racialised and orientalist-colonial imaginaries which falsely categorise people and places as either having or not having honour. This conflation presents honour as a cultural problem attributed to racialised communities mostly associated with the Muslim (...) World. Adopting a critical post- and de-colonial perspective, I undertake a discourse analysis of UN human rights documents to expose orientalist tropes that reproduce epistemic and material violence against honour. There are three strategies employed to commit this violence: first, through the reduction of honour to physical and emotional HRV—a violence predicated upon the logic of coloniality and the orientalist division of the world into modern and pre-modern states; second, by associating honour as violence with Muslims and migrant communities, the discourse furthers structural Islamophobia; third, by reproducing colonial saviour narratives that designate honour as control over women’s sexuality. The human rights discourse on honour forecloses upon alternative ways of understanding what honour is and means for those who live with it. As such, the international human rights discourse on honour extends the coloniality of power and the geopolitics of knowledge. (shrink)

Guidelines recommend a ‘do-not-resuscitate’ code status for inpatients in which cardiopulmonary resuscitation attempts are considered futile because of low probability of survival with good neurological outcome. We retrospectively assessed the prevalence of DNR code status and its association with presumed CPR futility defined by the Good Outcome Following Attempted Resuscitation score and the Clinical Frailty Scale in patients hospitalised in the Divisions of Internal Medicine and Traumatology/Orthopedics at the University Hospital of Basel between September 2018 and June 2019. The definition (...) of presumed CPR futility was met in 467 of 2889 patients. 866 patients had a DNR code status. In a regression model adjusted for age, gender, main diagnosis, nationality, language and religion, presumed CPR futility was associated with a higher likelihood of a DNR code status. In the subgroup of patients with presumed futile CPR, 144 of 467 had a full code status, which was independently associated with younger age, male gender, non-Christian religion and non-Swiss citizenship. We found a significant proportion of hospitalised patients to have a full code status despite the fact that CPR had to be considered futile according to an established definition. Whether these decisions were based on patient preferences or whether there was a lack of patient involvement in decision-making needs further investigation. (shrink)