A mother who forced her daughter to marry the man who would go on to kill the young woman should be jailed to send a message, say prosecutors.
“The community needs to know you can’t do this, you can’t operate in this manner in Australia,” prosecutor Darren Renton told the County Court in Melbourne.
“The ultimate risk is that people get murdered, and that’s what happened here.”
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Sakina Muhammad Jan, 48, is the first person in Australia to be convicted of causing a person to enter into a forced marriage since it was criminalised more than a decade ago.
She faced a pre-sentence hearing on Tuesday after a jury found her guilty of the offence in May.
Less than six months after Jan’s daughter, Ruqia Haidari, married Mohammad Ali Halimi, he killed the 21-year-old woman at their home in Perth.
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He is serving a life prison term for the murder.
Haidari told several people, including teachers, social workers, police officers and driving instructors, that she did not want to marry Halimi.
On August 19, 2019, she told her mother she did not want to marry him, but Jan said it was not her choice.
Haidari was married to him two days later, just two months after meeting Halimi for the first time.
The court was told on Tuesday this was not the first time Jan had forced Haidari into a marriage.
When she was aged 15 her mother forced her to marry a different man, which ended in divorce.
After the divorce, Haidari was considered as “bewa” by the Hazara community in Shepparton, meaning she had lost her value.
Renton said this had motivated Jan to commit the offence.
“That brought a level of shame both to Ms Haidari and the family,” he said.
“She (Jan) was motivated at least in part to restore that reputation by seeing the victim married and lose that status as bewa.”
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Jan held a position of trust in Haidari’s life as her only living parent and the offending represented a “significant breach” of that, he said.
However, Renton accepted Jan could not have known Halimi was going to murder her daughter.
“It’s a tragic case, no one anticipated the outcome,” he said.
“All the evidence was that he was being promoted as ‘a good boy’, sadly he wasn’t.”
Defence barrister Andrew Buckland asked for a community work order instead of prison for Jan due to the suffering she has experienced since her daughter’s death.
The 48-year-old woman, who continues to deny the offence, has suffered shame from her community and been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, he said.
“The very finding of guilt and the conviction is in itself a very significant punishment,” he said.
“It’s obviously a source of great shame for her and one that she will visibly carry in her community for life.”
Jan herself was a victim of forced marriage at a young age, and due to her lack of education and cultural ties she did not know any better, he said.
“Had she known what Mr Halimi was like, she would not have let her daughter marry this man,” he said.
The hearing continues.
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