Australian court jails mother for forcing daughter into fatal marriage

Sakina Muhammad Jan, a mother in her 40s, has become the first person to be jailed under Australia’s forced marriage laws after she forced her daughter to marry a man who later killed the 21-year-old.

According to the BBC, Jan was found guilty of coercing her daughter Ruqia Haidari to marry 26-year-old Mohammad Ali Halimi in 2019, in exchange for a small payment.

However, six weeks after the wedding, Halimi killed his new bride and is currently serving a life sentence for the vicious crime.

Jan, who pleaded not guilty, was sentenced Monday to at least a year in jail, for what a judge called the "intolerable pressure" she had placed on her daughter, the BBC reported.

In 2013, forced marriage laws were introduced in Australia with maximum penalty of seven years imprisonment and there are several cases pending.

Jan, an Afghan Hazara refugee who fled persecution from the Taliban and migrated to regional Victoria with her five children in 2013, suffers enduring "grief" over the death of her daughter but continues to maintain her innocence, her lawyers have said.

The trial heard that Haidari had been first forced to enter an unofficial religious marriage at the age of 15 but that union ended after two years and she did not want to marry again until she was 27 or 28.

"She wanted to pursue study and get a job," Judge Fran Dalziel said in her sentencing remarks.

While Jan may have believed she was acting in the best interests of her daughter, Dalziel said she had repeatedly ignored Haidari’s wishes and "abused" her power as a mother.

Jan was sentenced to three years in jail, but may be released after 12 months to serve the rest of her sentence in the community.

In 2021, during Halimi's sentencing for Haidari's murder, a court in Western Australia — where the couple had lived — heard that he had been violent and abusive towards his new wife, forcefully insisting that she undertake household chores.

In a statement on Monday, Attorney General Mark Dreyfus described forced marriage as "the most reported slavery-like offence" in Australia, with 90 cases brought to the attention of federal police in 2022-23 alone.