Ruqia Haidari wanted to marry for love.
Instead, she had an arranged marriage at the age of just 15, with the relationship ending in divorce when she was 20.
In the eyes of Shepparton’s Afghan Hazara community – where Haidari’s family settled after fleeing the Taliban – she was deemed a “bewa”, meaning she had lost her value due to the divorce, a Victorian court heard last week.
It was Haidari’s mother’s desire to restore her reputation, the prosecution argued, that led to her coercing 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 murdered his 21-year-old wife in their suburban Perth unit on 18 January 2020.
The same year, the Australian federal police (AFP) charged Haidari’s mother, grieving over the loss of her daughter, with orchestrating 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.
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 be served before she is released under several conditions including being of good behaviour.
Dalziel said that Jan, a permanent resident, could also face deportation back to Afghanistan, which would be a “very grave thing” for a Hazara woman.
“You abused your position as her [Haidari’s] mother, as the person with whom she loved and respected,” Dalziel said.
“While you believed you were acting in her best interests, you were not in fact doing so.”
She said that she believed it was the first time a person had been sentenced for a forced marriage, but noted that sentences were pending in New South Wales.
Those convicted of forced marriage, a form of modern slavery, face a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment.
In a statement released before Jan’s sentencing, the federal attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, on Monday said forced marriage “is the most reported slavery-like offence” to the AFP.
The AFP said they 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, as he announced a public consultation process on potential reforms.
“Everyone in Australia should be free to choose if, who and when they marry.”
‘Wanted to marry for love’
During Monday’s hearing, Dalziel said she accepted the prosecution’s position that Jan’s offending was a “mid-range” example of forced marriage, and rejected her protestations to police and a forensic psychologist that she had not known her daughter did not want to marry.
“It must be made clear to everyone in our country that forced marriage is against the law, and that forcing someone to take part in a marriage against their will leads to significant consequences for the offender … real punishment will follow such an offence.”
Sitting in the courtroom were more than a dozen supporters of Jan. Even more were turned away from the full courtroom.
Jan, who was supported by a translator, sat impassively and did not speak during the hearing. But she became animated and emotional while being asked by her lawyer to sign orders related to her sentence, as did several of her supporters.
She is aged 47 or 48, the court heard, a mother of five and grandmother of nine. All her children had arranged marriages, the court heard.
Jan had pleaded not guilty to the offence.
At 15, Haidari’s mother allegedly forced her to marry a man in an Islamic religious ceremony before it ended in divorce, the court had heard.
The prosecution argued that after the divorce, Haidari was viewed as not having “good prospects for marriage”, prompting her mother to begin the search for a new husband.
A matchmaker and mutual friend of Haidari and Halimi became involved and arranged for Halimi to fly to Shepparton in June 2019 to meet his prospective wife.
The court heard Haidari, Jan’s youngest child, told her mother, two driving instructors, a teacher, a counsellor and police 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 pair were wedded in a religious ceremony in November 2019 that was not officially registered, after Halimi paid a bride dowry of $14,000 to Jan.
Sentencing remarks from Halimi’s murder trial in the Western Australia supreme court laid bare the strained and brief marriage.
Haidari rejected her husband’s attempts at sexual intimacy, telling him to “go away”. The day before he murdered Halimi, he sent a video to her family, complaining that she would sleep late and did not cook or clean.
In the sentencing remarks, justice Bruno Fiannaca said Halimi’s police interview after the murder revealed he knew that Haidari had been pressured into marriage.
Halimi, who has been serving a life sentence with a minimum term of 19 years, also told police he found documentation showing Haidari had gone to police to find out if she could be forced to marry, the murder trial heard.
The ‘ultimate risk’
During a hearing in the county court last week, the defence and prosecution agreed there was no evidence that Jan knew Halimi would murder her daughter. But Renton argued that the “ultimate risk” of forced marriage was that people could be murdered.
He said Jan breached the trust of her daughter, as the sole living parent of Haidari – after the Taliban murdered her father when she was one month old.
He argued that Jan, who demonstrated no insight into the offence or remorse for her actions, needed to be imprisoned to deter others from engaging in the practice.
Defence barrister Andrew Buckland had argued against a sentence of imprisonment, saying the verdict was a “source of great shame” for Jan, who spoke no English and had never attended school.
Jan herself had entered into a forced marriage at 12 or 13 years old, before having her first child a year later.
Buckland said she was “perhaps only doing what she knew”. He argued Jan believed she was doing the right thing for her daughter under community pressures.
Dalziel found that there was no suggestion Jan knew Halimi was violent, but that she had still breached her responsibility.
“All her family were within the small Hazara community in Shepparton, as were her friends,” the judge said. “She would have known that not taking part in the marriage would have raised questions about you and the rest of her family within the Hazara community
“She was concerned not only about your anger but about your standing within the Hazara community.”
After Jan was taken into custody, one of her supporters collapsed in court.
Some others shouted and cried outside the courtroom.
One woman shouted: “I lost my sister, and now I lost my mum”.
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123 and the domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 988 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
With reporting by Australian Associated Press
