Saudi-British woman sentenced to 34 years for political posts on internet - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15243523
A woman has been sentenced to 34 years in prison by a Saudi court for allegedly spreading "rumors", and copying statements from political dissidents, through the internet site Twitter.
The woman was a Saudi citizen but had been in the United Kingdom (England) as a doctoral student. Presumably, all the posts she had made on Twitter had been done while she was in the United Kingdom.

The court ruling comes amid Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's crackdown on dissent.
The sentence is considered "shocking", even by Saudi standards of justice.

The woman is Salma al-Shehab, a mother of two and a researcher at Leeds University in Britain. She was detained during a family vacation on January 15, 2021, days before she planned to return to the United Kingdom.

According to the woman, she had been held for over 285 days in solitary confinement before her case was even referred to court.

Saudi doctoral student gets 34 years in prison for tweets | AP News, Isabel Debre, August 17, 2022
https://apnews.com/article/saudi-doctor ... b475c79121
#15243534
The current regime ruling Saudi Arabia is a friend and partner to the west.

The chances of significant government intervention on her behalf by western governments is not very high.

Still, one can not help applauding her for trying to hold her government accountable.
#15243790
I'm siding with cold hard logic. If you're gonna rock the boat make sure you aren't floating in lava. As a Saudi citizen she knew what she can and cannot say on a partially Saudi owned platform and the consequences therein. She will be forgotten by the news cycle in a month, and the next 30+ years will be her in a small cell.

Great achievement.
#15243832
Igor Antunov wrote:
I'm siding with cold hard logic. If you're gonna rock the boat make sure you aren't floating in lava. As a Saudi citizen she knew what she can and cannot say on a partially Saudi owned platform and the consequences therein. She will be forgotten by the news cycle in a month, and the next 30+ years will be her in a small cell.

Great achievement.



And what about *driving* -- are you authoritarian on *driving* also, because it's easier for you to just not-rock-the-boat -- ?



Women to drive movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The logo of the women to drive movement

Until June 2018, Saudi Arabia was the only country in the world in which women were forbidden from driving motor vehicles.[1] The Women to Drive Movement (Arabic: قيادة المرأة في السعودية qiyāda al-imarʾa fī as-Suʿūdiyya) was a campaign by Saudi women, whom the government denies many rights to which men are entitled,[2] for the right to drive motor vehicles on public roads. Dozens of women drove in Riyadh in 1990 and were arrested and had their passports confiscated.[3] In 2007, Wajeha al-Huwaider and other women petitioned King Abdullah for the right to drive,[4] and a film of al-Huwaider driving on International Women's Day 2008 attracted international media attention.[3][5][6]

In 2011, the Arab Spring motivated some women,[7][8] including al-Huwaider and Manal al-Sharif, to organise a more intensive campaign, and about seventy cases of women driving were documented in the latter half of June.[9][10][11] In late September, Shaima Jastania was sentenced to ten lashes for driving in Jeddah, although the sentence was later overturned.[12][13] Two years later, another campaign to defy the ban targeted 26 October 2013 as the date for women to start driving. Three days before, in a "rare and explicit restating of the ban", an Interior Ministry spokesman warned that "women in Saudi [Arabia] are banned from driving and laws will be applied against violators and those who demonstrate support."[14] Interior Ministry employees warned leaders of the campaign individually not to drive on 26 October, and police road blocks were assembled in Riyadh to check for women driving.[15]

On 26 September 2017, King Salman issued an order to allow women to drive, with new guidelines to be created and implemented by June 2018.[16] Women to drive campaigners were ordered not to contact media and in May 2018, several, including Loujain al-Hathloul, Eman al-Nafjan, Aisha Al-Mana, Aziza al-Yousef and Madeha al-Ajroush, were detained.[17][18] The ban was officially lifted on 24 June 2018, but many of the women's rights activists remained under arrest.[19] As of 23 August 2018, twelve remained in detention.[20]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_to_drive_movement
#15243965
Igor Antunov wrote:
There's a difference between petitioning to drive and engaging in shiite activism at a time when the kingdom is openly at war with shiites in arabia and in yemen. As I understand it she was engaging in pro-shiite activism..as a saudi citizen. This is akin to you engaging in pro-isis activities.



No, hardly.

Shiite Islam is widespread, certainly as much as *any* kind of Islam.

Yes, ISIS is tantamount to *fascism*, and I supported the Yazidis and Kurdistan, in opposition to Turkey / NATO support for the Islamists during the Obama Administration.

The whole thing is obviously a *civil rights* issue for women, and Saudi Arabia had no good reason to start its war on Yemen as it did.
#15244031
ckaihatsu wrote:No, hardly.

Shiite Islam is widespread, certainly as much as *any* kind of Islam.

Yes, ISIS is tantamount to *fascism*, and I supported the Yazidis and Kurdistan, in opposition to Turkey / NATO support for the Islamists during the Obama Administration.

The whole thing is obviously a *civil rights* issue for women, and Saudi Arabia had no good reason to start its war on Yemen as it did.


You failed to grasp my analogy - to a sunni shiites are scum, the absolute worst of the worst. Outright heretics. The kingdom is at war with shiites -iran, yemen and segments of its own populace. Actually I take my analogy back and modify it for extra clarification - what she did is even worse than if you started brandishing pro-isis rhetoric on social media in the west.
#15244068
Igor Antunov wrote:
You failed to grasp my analogy - to a sunni shiites are scum, the absolute worst of the worst. Outright heretics. The kingdom is at war with shiites -iran, yemen and segments of its own populace. Actually I take my analogy back and modify it for extra clarification - what she did is even worse than if you started brandishing pro-isis rhetoric on social media in the west.



This is just nationalist authoritarian moralism, which I'm used to hearing from *U.S.* (American-fundamentalist) moralists, not Sunni moralists, but it's all the same to me, anyway.

Are you really ready to sign-off on all of *this* -- ?



Male guardianship

See also: Wali (Islamic legal guardian) and Saudi anti male-guardianship campaign

Under previous Saudi law, all females were required to have a male guardian (wali), typically a father, brother, husband, or uncle (mahram). In 2019, this law was partially amended to exclude women over 21 years old from the requirement of a male guardian.[46] The new amendment also granted women rights in relation to the guardianship of minor children.[46][47] Previously, girls and women were forbidden from traveling, conducting official business, or undergoing certain medical procedures without permission from their male guardians.[85] In 2019, Saudi Arabia allowed women to travel abroad, register for divorce or marriage, and apply for official documents without the permission of a male guardian. Male guardians have duties to, and rights over, women in many aspects of civic life. A United Nations Special Rapporteur report states:

"Legal guardianship of women by a male is practiced in varying degrees and encompasses major aspects of women's lives. The system is said to emanate from social conventions, including the importance of protecting women, and from religious precepts on travel and marriage, although these requirements were arguably confined to particular situations."[61]

The official law, if not the custom, requiring a guardian's permission for a woman to seek employment was repealed in 2008.[65][86][87][88][89]

In 2012, the Saudi government implemented a new policy to help enforce these traveling restrictions for women. Under this policy, Saudi Arabian men receive a text message on their mobile phones whenever a woman under their custody leaves the country, even if she is traveling with her guardian. Saudi Arabian feminist activist Manal al-Sharif commented that "[t]his is technology used to serve backwardness in order to keep women imprisoned."[90]

Every year, more than 1,000 women try to flee Saudi Arabia. Text alerts, sent by the Saudi authorities, enable many guardians to catch women before they actually escape.[91] Bethany Vierra, a 31-year-old American woman, became the latest victim of the "male guardianship" system, as she was trapped in Saudi Arabia with her 4-year-old daughter, Zaina, despite the divorce from her Saudi husband.[92]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s ... ardianship
#15244080
And:



Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, No. 19-1392, 597 U.S. ___ (2022), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the court held that the Constitution of the United States does not confer a right to abortion. The court's decision overruled both Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), giving individual states the full power to regulate any aspect of abortion not preempted by federal law.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobbs_v._ ... ganization
#15244092
Truth To Power wrote:
Her public decapitation by sword would not be considered shocking by Saudi standards of justice.



---



Capital punishment in Saudi Arabia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Saudi Arabia. Death sentences are almost exclusively based on the system of judicial sentencing discretion (tazir), following the classical principle of avoiding Sharia-prescribed (hudud) penalties when possible.[1] In recent decades, the government and the courts have increasingly issued these sentences, reacting to a rise in violent crime during the 1970s. This paralleled similar developments in the U.S. and Mainland China in the late 20th century.[1]

The country executed at least 158 people in 2015,[2] at least 154 in 2016,[3] at least 146 in 2017,[4] 149 in 2018,[5] 184 in 2019,[6] and 27 in 2020. The drastic reduction in 2020 was due to a moratorium on death penalties for drug-related offenses[7] as Saudi Arabia proposed ending the death penalty for these and other nonviolent offences.[8][9] Additionally, on 26 April 2020, a royal decree ended the execution of people who were juveniles when they committed their crime.[10][11] (Saudi Arabia had previously executed these people despite having signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child.)[12] Nonetheless, there were 67 executions in 2021, more than doubling the previous year's, according to the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights. In January 2022, at least 43 detainees, including 12 minors, were threatened with execution.[13] On March 12, 2022, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people, seven of whom were Yemenis and one of whom was a Syrian,[14] in the largest known mass execution in the history of the country.[15]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_p ... udi_Arabia

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