Denmark summons Iranian ambassador over reports of illegal divorces

Denmark has summoned the Iranian ambassador over reports Tehran’s embassy is pressuring Muslim women to accept illegal divorce terms drawn up by local imams.

Only hours earlier, the government announced a crackdown on controversial Muslim marriage contracts, calling for up to three years’ imprisonment for imams who formulate them.

The problem came to the forefront last month when one woman revealed she was forced to accept divorce terms that stated she would lose custody of her children if she remarried.

Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said it was “unacceptable” and summoned Iran’s Danish envoy, Afsaneh Nadipour, to the Foreign Ministry to answer questions over the embassy’s involvement.

“I take the rumours extremely seriously that the Iranian embassy, unsolicited, had contacted women living here to pressure them to have their Danish divorce papers religiously validated,” he said.

Mr Kofod said the country would “in no way accept if an embassy is involved in cases that are contrary to Danish law – and contrary to our basic democratic values in Denmark”.

“The kind of religious control that we have heard about in the media does not belong in Denmark,” he said.

Immigration Minister Mattias Tesfaye told the Berlingske newspaper: “When we see imams getting involved in divorce cases in such a negative way, we need to take this more seriously. And I think a change of the law can help do that.”

Last month, an imam in the city of Odense was reported to police for making a divorce contract that barred a woman from moving more than 130 kilometres from her ex-husband and ordered her to pay him 75,000 krone ($11,840) to be divorced.