When stoning is men's business

Yet the difference between the woman convicted of manslaughter and the man who kills his wife or former partner and is sentenced for manslaughter is immense. The woman has suffered years of criminal assault at home and other forms of domestic violence – often sexual abuse, abuse against the children, and torturing of the family pets. This is not what men suffer who kill their wives. 'Nagging' has been portrayed as enough.

The law of murder, manslaughter, provocation and self-defence was developed over time by judges – all men in the western system, until in the twentieth century women were allowed to practice law, then eventually began to be appointed to courts as magistrates and judges.

For centuries in western countries, women were prosecuted and tried in courts where no other women were present. The judge, jury, lawyers, courtroom attendants, court recorders and everyone else was male. Women were found guilty by male judges, and taken to the scaffold to be hanged by hangmen, beheaded by axe-men, or electrocuted by men who threw the switch.

For centuries, women have fought for recognition and rights as human beings. For centuries, the fight has continued by women, for women to be accorded equal entitlements to dignity and respect. This is a world-wide struggle in which men of decency and justice ought to be engaged too. Sometimes, a few have taken up this responsibility. But the fact that women remain disentitled and unable to practice equal rights – and are too often explicitly denied them by law - means too few men have accepted that responsibility, must less joined the struggle.

No country, no civilisation and no society can operate justly without the full and equal participation of women. All men must recognise their responsibility when they live in a country and a world where women are denied rights, where women are treated unequally by the law, and where women can be put to death or abused in the name of the law.

For as long as one woman is at risk of death at the hands of a legal system devised and enforced by men, then men are responsible. As long as any woman is liable to death by stoning, men are responsible. As women, we take our responsibilities seriously. We lobby and strive to right the wrongs committed against women, just as we lobby and strive to right the wrongs committed against the whole of humanity. We must demand that men take their responsibilities seriously too – and men must demand this of themselves.

Men's responsibility is not to engage in crimes of violence and sexual abuse against women, whatever the relationship between them and their prospective victims. Their responsibility is to change laws that deny integrity and personhood to women. Their responsibility is to change a legal system that condones the death of women in the name of upholding the law. Their responsibility is to refuse to enforce inhuman and inhumane laws that end women's lives.

When laws end with the ending of women's lives, responsible people – women and men – know that those laws must be ended.