The life sentences for Saman Abbas's parents, Shabbar Abbas and Nazia Shaheen, and for his cousins Ijaz Ikram and Noman Ul Haq have become final, as has the 22-year prison sentence handed down to his uncle Danish Hasnain.
The decision came after the Court of Cassation rejected the defendants' appeals for the murder of the 18-year-old Pakistani girl killed in Novellara, in the Reggio Emilia area, in the spring of 2021. According to the prosecution, the young woman was murdered for opposing an arranged marriage and for adopting a lifestyle deemed incompatible with family traditions.
The defendants were found to face the aggravating circumstances of premeditation and frivolous motives.
Commenting on the ruling, Maria Teresa Manente, head of the legal department at Differenza Donna and the association's civil defense attorney, said: "This ruling represents a turning point on a social level, even before a legal one. The Court of Cassation definitively crystallizes what we have argued in every court: Saman was killed because she was a woman who rebelled against patriarchal rules, punished for escaping the subordinate role the family order imposed on her. Her death was not an excess, an impulse, an 'accident' from a distant cultural context: it was, as the trial documents themselves reveal, a punishment. The plan to kill her was born the very moment Saman dared to assert her right to choose who to love, whether to study, how to dress, how to live. Her freedom was her 'crime' in the eyes of her family; her life was its punishment."
(Unioneonline)