Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320
- 325)
THURSDAY 21 FEBRUARY 2008
JAGDEESH, IMRAN,
AJMAL, ANITA,
KIRANJIT AND
MEENA
Q320 Martin Salter: Did they do this
to other members of your family as well then?
Imran: No, just myself. I have
got three brothers and two sisters all in arranged marriages.
Where the two parties consent that is an arranged marriage but
for my brothers it was to keep my mother happy. They did not want
to get married but just to keep my mother happy they consented
where I stood my ground and I did not want to get married.
Q321 Martin Salter: So there was
a degree of coercion, a degree of enforcement or pressure put
on even in the arranged marriage situation?
Imran: Yes, absolutely. When my
mum was in hospital, when I said in Punjabi, "What can I
do to help?" the first words out her mouth were, "If
anything happens to me, it will be your fault." What could
I say to that?
Q322 Martin Salter: Last point, just
a stab in the dark from you: what proportion of arranged marriages
within your community—and I am only going to ask you to
talk about within your community or within your experience—have
got absolutely no coercion in them at all, no pressure?
Imran: With my sisters, I mean,
there was no pressure with them because they agreed just to keep
my mum happy again.
Q323 Martin Salter: That is pressure,
is it not?
Imran: Yes I suppose.
Q324 Martin Salter: That is the point.
Forget your family; the wider community. This is what I struggle
with and we as politicians from our backgrounds struggle with,
what is the difference between arranged marriage and forced marriage?
How do you define a genuine arranged marriage?
Imran: An arranged marriage is
where the two parties both consent to the marriage, a forced marriage
is when one consents and one does not.
Martin Salter: I will leave it there.
Thank you very much.
The Chairman resumed the Chair
Q325 Chairman: Thank you Martin.
Unfortunately, Ann Cryer had to go to another meeting and Margaret
is having to disappear as well. We have come to the end of our
session in any case. I apologise for not being here at the beginning;
it is a heavy day for Home Office issues. I wanted to thank all
of you for coming. This is a very difficult thing for you all
to do. You have lived with these problems for many many years
and we are very grateful to you for coming here. I am only sorry
that we could not have this in a public setting. I know many of
you have spoken privately but some of the points you made, Jagdeesh,
are best made publicly in terms of getting people to listen. However,
I can assure you even though this is a private session everything
that you have said will form part of our report. We want this
to be a very hard-hitting report. Only yesterday the leader of
the Conservative Party set out a new policy for his Party on forced
marriages involving criminalisation, so even though this has been
to some extent put on the sidelines (apart from people like Margaret
Moran and Ann Cryer who have been campaigning for many years on
this issue) Parliament will take it seriously and all the points
that you have made will be acted upon. In fact, we have got a
note of this meeting and I will write to David Miliband and ask
what has been done as a result of your meeting because of the
point you make about the treatment in particular by the Foreign
Office of certain types of people being quite different in certain
circumstances. We are going to have the Foreign Office before
us. We have asked for the entry clearance officer from Islamabad
to come. Is that the right post to get here? It is Pakistan rather
than India. I know this problem is in India as well but we had
to choose one of them, so we have chosen Islamabad as the post
to bring the entry clearance manager over. Is that the right thing
to have done?
Jagdeesh: I think you should go
much senior than that and you should go for the British High Commissioner.
This has been the critical problem; the Foreign Office is quite
happy to delegate to a junior person somewhere in the system and
these cases get relegated down.
Chairman: It will not just be a junior
person, it will be a head of visas, but obviously if the High
Commissioner can come we will have him and we will pursue this
then. Thank you very much for coming; we are very grateful.
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