Jasvinder Sanghera of Derby said her sister Robina was driven to suicide after she was told that she could not leave her husband because her family would be ashamed. When her sister killed herself, Sanghera was on the run from home because she had refused to marry a man her parents had lined up for her from the age of eight.

She told the EU Forced Marriages Conference in central London yesterday that she still held those people accountable for the death of Robina. The two-day conference, hosted by the Foreign Office and the European Commission’s Daphne Fund, is to allow the UK’s Forced Marriage Unit to share its experience with other countries. Robina was taken out of school at the age of 15, forced to marry, and then to move to Germany with her husband.

But at the age of 24 she sought help, Sanghera said. She told delegates at Lancaster House: “She suffered horrific abuse in her marriage — physical, mental abuse.

“I begged her to leave her partner but she said to me: ‘It’s ok for you to say that but you don’t have the authority because you are disowned’.”

“She was right. The people who could make the difference were my parents, family and community leaders. That’s where she went and they sent her back, saying she should make the marriage work. Was she driven to commit suicide? I would say so. She set herself on fire and suffered 80 per cent burns. I still hold people accountable for her death.”

Sanghera, 42, whose family is originally from Punjab told the conference that South Asian women in Britain had a suicide rate two to three times above average. She said, “The question I ask is: are we being driven to commit suicide or is suicide covering up murder.”

She said statistics showed there were 12 so-called “honour killings” every year. Her own family disowned her after she refused to marry the man they chose and she ran away from home. She said, “I rang up my mother and the response I never expected to hear is the response hundreds of girls are hearing today. That was to tell me that I was the perpetrator. In their eyes I was dead.” Her younger sister then had to marry the man chosen for her so the agreement was honoured, Sanghera said.