A team of international experts saw that two women sentenced to decades in prison in Saudi Arabia for posts on social media are arbitrarily detained and must be released, according to a report seen by Agence France-Presse on Saturday.
Last year’s prison sentence for Salma Al-Shihab and Noura Al-Qahtani over posts on Twitter criticizing the authorities shed light on the repression in Saudi Arabia despite Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country, trying to modernize it and show its openness.
In a report dated June 19, seen by AFP on Saturday, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, a panel of independent experts linked to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, considered that Al-Shihab and Al-Qahtani were being held arbitrarily and “the appropriate compensation is their release.”
He stressed that they should be granted “an enforceable right to damages and other compensation in accordance with international law.”
The report mentioned “reliable evidence” showing that Al-Shehab was subjected to “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” during her arrest, explaining that the violations against her included “threats, insults, harassment and inappropriate methods adopted during her interrogation,” such as “exploiting her depression by interrogating her in the middle of the night.” After taking her antidepressant and sleeping pills.
The Saudi authorities rejected the conclusions of the team, stressing that the judicial process against the two women was fair, denying that Al-Shehab was ill-treated in prison.
Saudi officials did not respond to an AFP request for comment on Saturday.
Al-Shihab, who belongs to the Shiite minority in the Kingdom, was pursuing her doctoral studies in Britain, and the authorities stopped her in January 2021 during a vacation in her country. She said that she spent 285 days in solitary confinement before being convicted in March 2022 by a court specialized in “terrorism” cases.
The evidence used against her included posts in support of women’s rights and retweets of a well-known Saudi women’s rights activist.
In August, she was sentenced to 34 years in prison and banned from traveling for a similar period after the expiration of her sentence.
As for Al-Qahtani, a mother of two, she was sentenced last year to 45 years in prison for using Twitter to “challenge” King Salman and his son, the Crown Prince.
Al-Qahtani’s Twitter account, mentioned in the case documents, included posts critical of the government and calls for protests against it.
2023-07-08 13:18:22
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