Saudi rights activist al-Hathloul hopes for sentence change
shahennews
Women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, who was released last month after serving three years in prison, has said she hoped a Saudi court would amend her sentence as she headed to an appeals hearing on Wednesday.
“Let’s hope the sentence has been changed or modified a little bit. We will see how it goes,” al-Hathloul, 31, told reporters outside Riyadh’s Special Criminal Court on Wednesday, before entering for a second session regarding her appeal.
Al-Hathloul, who championed women’s right to drive and for an end to Saudi’s male guardianship system, was detained in May 2018 and sentenced under broad cybercrime and counterterrorism laws in December to nearly six years in prison on charges that United Nations rights experts called spurious.
The court suspended two years and 10 months of her sentence, most of which had already been served. Al-Hathloul remains under a five-year travel ban.
The Saudi activist rose to prominence in 2013 when she began publicly campaigning for women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia.
She was arrested for the first time in 2014 while attempting to drive across the border from the United Arab Emirates – where she had a valid driver’s licence – to Saudi Arabia.
She spent 73 days in a women’s detention facility, an experience she later said helped shape her campaigning against the kingdom’s male guardianship system.
First female municipal candidate
In 2016, a year after she became one of the first women to stand for municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, she was among 14,000 signatories of a petition to King Salman calling for an end to the guardianship system.
Al-Hathloul’s arrest in 2018 – along with that of at least a dozen other women’s rights activists in a crackdown on dissent led by de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – came just weeks before the historic lifting of a decades-old ban on female drivers, a reform al-Hathloul had long campaigned for.
The detention of women activists also cast a renewed spotlight on the human rights record in the kingdom, an absolute monarchy that has also faced intense criticism over the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate.
The female activist’s case has drawn intense criticism from rights groups, members of the United States Congress and European Union politicians.
US President Joe Biden’s administration, which has taken a tougher stance over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record than the administration of former President Trump, had urged Riyadh to release political prisoners including women’s rights activists.
Saudi authorities released two activists with US citizenship on bail in February pending trials on “terror”-related charges.
In January, a Saudi appeals court nearly halved a six-year prison sentence for a US-Saudi physician and suspended the remainder of it, meaning he did not have to return to jail.
Walid al-Fitaihi was detained in 2017 under Mohammed bin Salman’s anti-corruption campaign and was sentenced to six years in prison in December.
