Trevor Todd and Jackson Todd have over sixty years combined experience in handling estate matters including contested marriage like matters.
In Jaura v Jaura 2025 BCSC 503 534 court annulled a marriage where the purported wife did not consent to the marriage and was found to have been forced into going through with a marriage ceremony
Both families were affiliated with a religion based called group in India.
The claimant then aged 18 first spoke to the respondent than age 32, and within a week. He began pressing for marriage despite her objections under being under age.
Over several months, the respondent and his family pressured the claimant, citing religious blessings and threats of divine or community retribution if she refused.
After several months, the respondent and his relative took the claimant from work to a private home, provided her with a wedding outfit, and arrange the ceremony, attended only by his family. The claimant felt shocked, overwhelmed and manipulated throughout. The claimant immediately returned their her wedding ring, refused further contact, and the marriage was never consummated.
The claimant then applied for an order unknowing her marriage. In Canada, annulments are rarely granted, but may be granted where the claimant establishes that the formal requirements for marriage under the civil marriage act have not been met, for example, Jew to duress or lack of consent. In such cases the marriage will be deemed avoidable.
The court decided that the claimants will was overborne by the respondents coercion and in the circumstances of the ceremony, making her consent invalid in the marriage avoidable latter instance. Importantly, the court noted, at paragraph 24 of the decision that while necessary in the past, physical force is no longer required to make out duress. Duress will be made out where there is an absence of free choice, or oppression generated by fear, persuasion or pressure.
THE LAW
In Parihar v. Bhatti (1980), 17 R.F.L. (2d) 289, 1980 CanLII 362 (B.C.S.C.), this Court considered the case of a woman pressured into marriage by her own family. MacKinnon L.J.S.C. did not find the duress brought on by such pressure to be at the degree necessary to set aside the marriage:
There are many situations where families, or others, bring great persuasion upon a person to enter into marriage. However, the cases indicate that the duress sufficient to set aside the marriage must be of such a nature that her powers of volition were so affected that it really was no consent.
In Parojcic (Ivetic) v. Parojcic, [1959] 1 All E.R. 1 (P.D.A.) at 6, Davies J. states:
“I am quite satisfied and find that from and after Nov. 11, when this marriage was first mooted by the petitioner’s father at Victoria right up till Dec. 29, the subject was the cause of constant quarrels between them. The father was always insisting that the petitioner should marry the respondent and the petitioner was constantly refusing. On more than one occasion, as he himself admits, he threatened her that if she persisted in her refusal he would send her back to Yugoslavia. Whether he could have done so or not, both of them believed it was possible, and the threat not unnaturally after her past experience terrified the petitioner. She told her father that she would rather commit suicide than return to Yugoslavia. There is no doubt that during this period of six weeks the petitioner was very unhappy and constantly crying, as also as her mother who was equally opposed to the match. Finally on the day before the wedding her father hit her in the course of an argument about the matter, no doubt when he was telling her that she must go to Oxford on the following day. On this evidence, which I accept, there is no doubt that this young woman was terrified into obedience by her father who was almost a stranger to her after years of separation and who may well have been imbued with ideas of patria potestas which were fundamentally foreign to his daughter. In the words of Butt J. in Scott v. Sebright (1886), 12 P.D. 21 at p. 31:
‘… long before the ceremony was gone through the feelings of this young lady towards the respondent were such that of her free and unconstrained will she never would have married him; that she had been reduced by mental and bodily suffering to a state in which she was incapable of offering resistance to coercion and threats which in her normal condition she would have treated with the contempt she must have felt for the man who made use of them; and that, therefore, there never was any such consent on her part as the law requires for the making of a contract of marriage.’
“Every single word of that is applicable to the present case, except that in this case it was the father who exercised the duress on her. I am quite satisfied in accordance with that, and the other authorities, that this petitioner has shown that she never in fact consented to this marriage and she was driven to go through the ceremony by the terror instilled in her by the threats exercised and made to her by her father in the course of the six weeks preceding the marriage; indeed, the only six weeks of her life that she had spent in this country.”
In my opinion, the evidence here does not satisfy me the marriage ought to be declared null and void. There was no corroboration at all of the plaintiff’s allegations of fear. It may be that the alternative to her going through with the marriage would be most unpleasant for her but I do not consider that the facts presented to me justify the relief requested.
In that 1959 case of Parojcic, referenced in Parihar at para. 12, the Court found that duress was made out in respect of a young woman who, for her refusal to marry the respondent in that case, was physically beaten at the hands of her estranged father and threatened with transportation to a distant land.
These principles have been adopted in more recent decisions by this Court. In R.H. v. R.T., 2011 BCSC 678, for instance, Justice Maisonville set out the factors to be examined to determine if a claimant’s mind was so overborne by pressure to constitute duress vitiating the consent to marriage:
… Oppression can take many forms and the matter is one of degree which is a question of fact for the court. The circumstances to be considered in the assessment include:
- the party’s emotional state at the time of the marriage ceremony,
- the party’s vulnerability,
- the time between the alleged coercive conduct and the marriage ceremony,
- whether marriage was consummated,
- the residence of the parties during the marriage,
- the amount of time until the start of the annulment proceedings.
[29] However, the most important consideration for the court when considering an annulment on the basis of duress is the parties’ emotional state at the time of the marriage ceremony. If the parties are mentally competent to give consent even if they may be reluctant and feel pressured, this is not sufficient ground to grant an annulment on the basis of duress. The emotional state must completely overbear the will to consent, however reluctant or hesitant the party may be.
The claimant described her emotional condition during this process in the following terms:
– unable to comprehend what was going on;
– stressed and overwhelmed;
– in a state of shock; and
– manipulated into a situation I didn’t fully understand.
Those in attendance consisted only of the respondent’s family. The claimant’s family was in no way included. She was alone and without any support of any kind.
The claimant deposed she is a Sikh, and that she and the respondent did not marry by way of the religious Sikh marriage ceremony known as the Anand Karaj involving the sacred Guru Granth Sahib. She deposed that she “cannot think of marrying someone without adherence to my Sikh faith.”
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