ABSTRACT

In England and other common law jurisdictions provocation operates as a mitigatory or partial defence to murder aimed at the reduction of that crime to the lesser offence of voluntary（or intentional）manslaughter.

For a plea of provocation to succeed the jury must be satisfied that the accused was deprived of her self-control at the time of the killing（the subjective test）and that this was the result of wrongful conduct serious enough to provoke an ordinary or reasonable person（the objective test.

If there is no evidence to support a finding of provocation, the defence will fail, whether the accused lost her self-control or not. Moreover, even if the victim’s conduct was such as to amount to provocation in law, the defence cannot be relied upon if evidence shows that the accused did not lose self-control as a result. Determining the threshold of legal provocation presupposes a moral judgment about what sort of offensive conduct is capable of arousing in a person such a degree of justified anger or indignation that might defeat her capacity for self control.

Although legal wrongdoings of a significant nature should for the most part provide a sufficient basis for the defence, non-legal, moral wrongdoings may also be considered serious enough to pass the threshold of provocation in law. Over this threshold, provocations may vary from the less serious ones（e.g. verbal provocations）to those involving very serious wrong doings (e.g. provocations involving physical violence. Provocations involving different forms and degrees of wrongdoing may equally support a partial defence to murder, provided that the requirement of loss of self-control is also satisfied.

In recent years some Islamist regimes, such as those of Iran, Pakistan, Sudan and the northern states of Nigeria, have reintroduced Islamic law in place of Western criminal codes. This was after the abolition of Islamic criminal law in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Previously, during the pre-modern period, Islamic criminal law was applied across the Muslim world, and there are many examples of that application in the abundant archives and other sources of the period.

This research work is aimed at analyzing provocation as a defence to murder under criminal and Islamic law.