Sakina Muhammad Jan, a mother in her 40s, has become the first person jailed under Australia's forced marriage laws after forcing her daughter to marry a man who then killed the 21-year-old.
According to the BBCJan was found guilty of forcing her daughter Ruqia Haidari to marry Mohammad Ali Halimi, 26, 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 heinous crime.
Jan, who pleaded not guilty, was sentenced on Monday to at least a year in jail for what a judge called the “intolerable pressure” she had put on her daughter, BBC reported.
In 2013, forced marriage laws were introduced in Australia with maximum sentences of seven years in prison and several cases are pending.
Jan, an Afghan Hazara refugee who fled Taliban persecution and migrated to Victoria with her five children in 2013, is suffering from enduring “grief” over her daughter's death but continues to maintain her innocence, her lawyers said.
The trial heard that Haidari had been forced into an unofficial religious marriage when she was 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 continue her education and get a job,” Judge Fran Dalziel said in her sentencing remarks.
While Jan may have believed she was acting in her daughter's best interests, Dalziel said she had repeatedly ignored Haidari's wishes and “abused” her power as a mother.
Jan was sentenced to three years in prison, but could be released after 12 months to serve the remainder of her sentence in the community.
In 2021, during Halimi's sentencing for Haidari's murder, a court in Western Australia (where the couple lived) heard that he had been violent and abusive towards his new wife, forcefully insisting that she do the housework.
In a statement on Monday, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus described forced marriage as “the most reported slavery-like crime” in Australia, with 90 cases brought to the attention of federal police in 2022-23 alone.
