A Syrian man, now 30 years old, married a 15-year-old girl in an Islamic ceremony in 2022 – he has now been acquitted of 140 counts of rape. Don’t forget: as soon as this person receives a German passport, he is just as culturally and otherwise connected to you as the other Germans. Anyone who speaks about this or writes something like this is considered a right-wing extremist. By the way: the public prosecutor’s office is now examining whether proceedings will be initiated against the now 18-year-old victim.
A now 30-year-old Syrian man accused of over 140 counts of rape against a girl who was just 15 years old when the assaults started was acquitted by Krefeld District Court. The inconceivable justification: it was an ‘Islamic marriage’. In plain language, this means that a religiously motivated child marriage is accepted by a German court as legitimisation for systematic rape.
The accused had ‘married’ the girl – his cousin – in Lebanon and repeatedly sexually abused her over a period of two years. The public prosecutor’s office assumed that the rapes were serious and persistent.
The alleged victim had noted the incidents in a diary. However, the court did not follow her testimony. A psychiatric expert categorised her statements as implausible and inconsistent. The presiding judge referred to chat histories and pictures: ‘I miss you, I kiss your hands and feet’, she is said to have written to the 30-year-old defendant. The court considered this to be evidence of a voluntary relationship. The fact that she was only 15 years old at the time of the marriage – and her husband almost twice as old – was irrelevant to the court.
Also on trial was a 39-year-old Syrian man, who was also charged with deprivation of liberty, assault and coercion. Both defendants denied all charges. Their defence lawyers spoke of a fabricated story. The background was a family dispute between two Syrian clans. The 30-year-old described the relationship as loving and consensual. The engagement is said to have been celebrated in Syria as early as 2021 – at a time when the girl was 14 or 15 years old.
Just strange: the public prosecutor’s office is now examining whether proceedings will be initiated against the now 18-year-old girl – for false suspicion and unsworn false testimony.
This is not the first time that German courts have caved in to so-called ‘child marriages’. Legislators are partly to blame. The law passed in 2017 to combat child marriages was overturned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 2023 under the Islam-devout traffic light regime because it was allegedly too sweeping. Since then, there has been a legal vacuum in which ‘marriages’ with minors from ‘certain cultural backgrounds’ are de facto tolerated, almost protected.