By Thomas Murphy
Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East

SANA’A, Yemen – A fifteen-year-old Yemeni girl was burned to death by her father after he caught her contacting her fiance before their wedding. Prosecutors intend to press charges against her thirty-five-year-old father, who was arrested in the remote village of Shabaa, in Taiz province.

“The father committed this heinous crime on the pretext that his daughter had been keeping contacts with her fiance,” the police website said on Tuesday, giving no further details.

Local news websites have reported that the father had caught the pair talking on the phone.

In some parts of Yemen it is traditional tribal custom to prevent men and women from contacting each other before marriage. Tribal loyalties run deep in the impoverished Arabian peninsula nation and often take precedence over the writ of the central government.

Yemeni women are generally accorded a low status in the family and community. Women often find themselves subject to of various forms of violence, deprivation of education, early and forced marriages, sexual abuse, restrictions over freedom of movement, forced pregnancy, and female genital mutilation. Killings of daughters, wives or sisters to punish perceived breaches of family honor are not uncommon.

Last year, the UN Human Rights council raised concerns about so-called “honor killings” in the country. Perpetrators were not charged with murder, and faced only a six-month to one-year prison sentence, it found.

In 2010, the Yemen Social Affairs Ministry released a report that stated more than 25 percent of the country’s females marry before the age of fifteen. It is a traditional tribal belief that younger brides are more easily molded in desirable and obedient wives.

The country previously required individuals to be at least fifteen-years-old before they could be married, but in the 1990s the law was annulled. The current policy is that parents should decided when their daughters are to be married. This scenario allows impoverished families to marry away their daughters at young ages for compensation sometimes reaching into the hundreds of dollars.

For further information, please see:

Al Arabiya – Yemeni 15-year-old girl burned to death for ‘meeting fiance’ – 23 October 2013

BBC – Yemeni ‘burns daughter to death for contacting fiance’ –  23 October 2013

Daily Mail – Yemeni father burns his daughter, 15, to death for keeping in touch with her fiance –  23 October 2013

Reuters – Yemeni burns daughter to death for contacting fiance: police – 23 October 2013