Ruqia Haidari wanted to marry for love.
Instead, she had an arranged marriage when she was just 15, and the relationship ended in divorce when she was 20.
In the eyes of the Afghan Hazara community in Shepparton – where Hádari’s family settled after fleeing the Taliban – she was considered a “bewa”, meaning she had lost her worth because of the divorce, a Victorian court heard this week. spent
Haidari’s mother’s desire to restore her reputation, the prosecution argued, led to her forcing her daughter into a second marriage, this time to 25-year-old Perth man Mohammad Ali Halimi.
Their loveless marriage lasted less than two months. Halimi killed his 21-year-old wife in their suburban Perth unit on 18 January 2020.
In the same year, the Australian federal police (AFP) charged Haidari’s mother, grieving the loss of her daughter, with arranging a forced marriage.
After a two-week trial in May, Sakina Muhammad Jan became the first person in Australia to be found guilty of arranging a forced marriage since the practice was criminalized more than 10 years ago.
Jan returned to the county court in Melbourne on Monday, where Judge Fran Dalziel sentenced her to three years in prison, with 12 months to serve before being released on a number of conditions including good behaviour.
Dalziel said Jan, a permanent resident, could also face deportation back to Afghanistan, which would be a “very serious matter” for the Hazara woman.
“You abused your position like her [Haidari’s] his mother, as the person she lived with and loved,” said Dalziel.
“Even though you believed you were acting in her best interest, you really weren’t.”
She said she believed it was the first time someone had been sentenced for forced marriage, but noted there were pending sentences in New South Wales.
Those convicted of forced marriage, a form of modern slavery, face a maximum penalty of seven years in prison.
In a statement released before Jan’s sentencing, federal attorney general Mark Dreyfus told the AFP on Monday that forced marriage was “the most commonly reported offense of slavery”.
The AFP said it received 90 reports of forced marriage in 2022-23 alone.
“The Australian government is working with state and territory governments to tackle the issue of forced marriage, including by exploring enhanced civil protections and remedies for those affected,” Dreyfus said, announcing a public consultation process on potential reforms.
“Everyone in Australia should be free to choose who and when to marry.”
‘I wanted to marry for love’
During Monday’s hearing, Dalziel said she accepted the prosecution’s position that Jan’s conviction was a “mid-range” example of a forced marriage, and rejected her objections to police and a forensic psychologist that she did not know her daughter was ask for marriage.
“It must be made clear to everyone in our country that forced marriage is against the law, and that if someone is forced into a marriage against their will there will be significant consequences for the offender… there will be serious punishment such an offence.”
Sitting in the courtroom were more than a dozen of January’s supporters. Even more turned out of the entire courtroom.
Jan, supported by a translator, sat passively and did not speak during the hearing. But she became animated and emotional as she asked her lawyer to sign orders relating to her sentence, as did some of her supporters.
She is 47 or 48 years old, the court heard, a mother of five and grandmother of nine. All his children had arranged marriages, the court heard.
Jan pleaded not guilty to the offence.
At the age of 15, Haidari’s mother allegedly forced her to marry a man in an Islamic religious ceremony before it ended in divorce, the court heard.
The prosecution argued that, after the divorce, Haidari was considered to have “no good marriage prospects”, prompting her mother to begin the search for a new husband.
A member and mutual friend of Haidari and Halimi got involved and arranged for Halimi to fly to Shepparton in June 2019 to meet his future wife.
The court heard that Haidari, Jan’s youngest child, told her mother, two driving instructors, a teacher, a counselor and the police that she did not want to marry Halimi.
Prosecutor Darren Renton SC said Haidari told a friend she “wanted to marry for love” and had not arranged a second marriage.
The pair were married in a religious ceremony in November 2019 that was not officially registered, after Halimi paid a bride’s dowry of $14,000 until January.
Sentencing remarks from Halimi’s murder trial in Western Australia’s supreme court put the marriage under short stress.
Haidari rejected her husband’s attempts at intercourse, telling him to “go away”. The day before he murdered Halimi, he sent a video to her family, complaining that she slept late and didn’t cook or clean.
In sentencing remarks, Judge Bruno Fiannaca said Halimi’s police interview after the murder showed he knew Haidari was under pressure to marry.
Halimi, who is serving a minimum 19-year life sentence, also told police he found documentation showing Haidari went to police to find out if she could be forced into marriage, the murder trial heard.
The ‘ultimate risk’
During a county court hearing last week, the defense and prosecution agreed there was no evidence Jan knew Halimi would close her daughter. But Renton argued that the “ultimate danger” of forced marriage was the possibility of murder.
He said Jan had violated her daughter’s trust, as Haidari’s only living parent – after her father was murdered by the Taliban when she was a month old.
He argued that Jan, who had shown no insight into the offense or remorse for her actions, needed to be jailed to discourage others from taking part in the practice.
Defense barrister Andrew Buckland had argued against a prison sentence, saying the verdict was “a source of great shame” for Jan, who spoke no English and had never attended school.
Jan herself entered into a forced marriage aged 12 or 13, before giving birth to her first child a year later.
Buckland said she was “perhaps doing what she knew”. He argued that Jan believed she was doing the right thing for her daughter under community pressure.
Dalziel found that Jan had no suggestion that Halimi knew Halimi was violent, but still violated her responsibility.
“Her entire family was within the small Hazara community in Shepparton, as were her friends,” the judge said. “She would have known that there would be questions about you and the rest of her family within the Hazara community if she did not participate in the marriage.
“She was concerned not only about your anger but about your standing within the Hazara community.”
After Jan was taken into custody, one of his supporters collapsed in court.
Others screamed and cried outside the courtroom.
One woman shouted: “I lost my sister, and now I lost my mother”.
• In Australia, the Lifeline crisis support service is on 13 11 14 and the national domestic violence counseling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123 and the abuse helpline is family use is 0808 2000 247. In the United States, the suicide prevention hotline is 988 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
For reporting by the Australian Associated Press