Ruqia Haidari wanted to marry for love.
Instead, she was married off at age 15, but the relationship ended in divorce when she was 20.
In the eyes of the Afghan Hazara community in Shepparton – where Haidari’s family settled after fleeing the Taliban – she was considered a “bewa”, meaning she had lost her value as a result of the separation, a Victorian court heard last week.
It was Haidari’s mother’s desire to restore her reputation, the prosecution argued, that led her to force her daughter into a second marriage, this time to 25-year-old Mohammad Ali Halimi from Perth.
Their loveless marriage lasted less than two months. Halimi murdered his 21-year-old wife in their Perth suburb on January 18, 2020.
That same year, Australian Federal Police (AFP) accused Haidari’s mother, who was grieving the loss of her daughter, of 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 criminalised more than 10 years ago.
On Monday, Jan returned to court in Melbourne, where Judge Fran Dalziel sentenced her to three years in prison, of which she must serve 12 months before being released on various 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 a Hazara woman.
“You abused your position as her [Haidari’s] “I saw her as my mother, as the person she lived with and respected,” Dalziel said.
“While you thought you were acting in her best interests, in reality you were not.”
She said it was the first time someone had been convicted of a forced marriage, but noted that sentences in New South Wales were still pending.
People convicted of forced marriage, a form of modern slavery, face a maximum prison sentence of seven years.
In a statement released ahead of Jan’s sentencing, federal Attorney General Mark Dreyfus said on Monday that forced marriages are “the most commonly reported slavery-like offence” to the AFP.
According to AFP, they received 90 reports of forced marriages in 2022-2023 alone.
“The Australian Government is working with state and territory governments to address the issue of forced marriage, including by exploring better protections and remedies for those affected,” Dreyfus said, announcing a public consultation process on possible reforms.
“Everyone in Australia should be free to choose whether, who and when they marry.”
‘Want to marry for love’
At Monday’s hearing, Dalziel said she accepted the prosecution’s position that Jan’s offence was a “medium-scale” example of forced marriage, and rejected her representations to police and a forensic psychologist that she did not know her daughter did not want to marry.
“It must be clear to everyone in our country that forced marriages are against the law, and that forcing someone to enter into a marriage against their will leads to significant consequences for the offender… such an offence will be met with real punishment.”
More than a dozen of Jan’s supporters were in the courtroom. Even more were turned away from the crowded courtroom.
Jan, who was assisted by an interpreter, sat impassively and did not speak during the hearing. But she became animated and emotional when her lawyer asked her to sign orders regarding her sentence, as did several of her supporters.
She is 47 or 48 years old, the court heard, a mother of five and grandmother of nine. All her children had arranged marriages, the court heard.
Jan had denied being guilty of the offence.
According to the court, Haidari’s mother allegedly forced her to marry a man at the age of 15 in an Islamic religious ceremony, before the marriage ended in divorce.
The prosecution argued that after the divorce, Haidari was not seen as someone with “good prospects for marriage,” prompting her mother to look for a new husband.
A matchmaker 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, an adviser and the police that she did not want to marry Halimi.
Prosecutor Darren Renton SC said Haidari had told a friend she “wanted to marry for love” and did not want a second arranged marriage.
The couple married in November 2019 in a religious ceremony that was not officially registered, after Halimi paid Jan a $14,000 dowry.
The verdicts in Halimi’s murder trial in the Western Australian Supreme Court exposed the strained and short marriage.
Haidari rejected her husband’s attempts at sexual intimacy and told him to “go away.” The day before he killed Halimi, he sent a video to her family complaining that she slept late and did not cook or clean.
In his sentencing remarks, Judge Bruno Fiannaca said Halimi’s interrogation by police after the killing revealed that he knew Haidari had been pressured into marrying.
Halimi, who is serving a life sentence with a minimum sentence of 19 years, also told police he had found documentation showing that Haidari had gone to police to find out if she could be forced to marry, lawyers heard during the murder trial.
The ‘ultimate risk’
At a hearing in county court last week, the defense and prosecution agreed there was no evidence Jan knew Halimi would kill her daughter. But Renton argued the “ultimate risk” of forced marriages was that people could be killed.
He said Jan had betrayed her daughter’s trust, as Haidari’s only surviving parent, after the Taliban killed her father when she was a month old.
He argued that Jan, who showed no insight into the crime and no remorse for her actions, should be imprisoned to deter others from engaging in this practice.
Defence lawyer Andrew Buckland had opposed a prison sentence, saying the sentence was a “source of great shame” for Jan, who spoke no English and had never been to school.
Jan herself had entered into a forced marriage at the age of 12 or 13, before having her first child a year later.
Buckland said she “may have only done what she knew”. He argued that Jan believed she was doing the right thing for her daughter under pressure from the community.
Dalziel concluded that there was no evidence that Jan knew Halimi was violent, but that she had nevertheless breached her responsibility.
“Her entire family was in the small Hazara community in Shepparton, as were her friends,” the judge said. “She should have known that not taking part in the marriage would raise questions about you and the rest of her family within the Hazara community
“She was concerned not only about your anger, but also about your position within the Hazara community.”
After Jan was arrested, one of her supporters collapsed in the courtroom.
Others screamed and cried outside the courtroom.
A woman cried out, “I lost my sister, and now my mother.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline can be reached on 13 11 14 and the national family violence support service on 1800 737 732. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on the freephone number 116 123 and the domestic violence helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the suicide prevention helpline is 988 and the domestic violence helpline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
With reporting from Australian Associated Press