Thursday 22 November 2007
Dubai - A recent Saudi court ruling sentencing a woman to six months in jail and 200 lashes despite being gang-raped highlights the injustice faced by women in the ultra-conservative kingdom, women rights activists said.
"Sure, there is injustice against women in courts. It is a bitter situation that Saudi women have to endure," Saudi activist Wajiha al-Hweider said on Thursday, after the court ruling received widespread publicity.
"The kingdom is in an embarrassing position. King (Abdullah) should step in and stop this farce," Hweider told AFP, adding that the judicial system, which is based on Islamic law, should be reformed.
Despite being raped by seven men who kidnapped her with a male companion at knife-point, the 19-year-old woman was sentenced in November 2006 to 90 lashes.
The judge sentenced her for being in a car with a man who was not her relative, a taboo in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.
But her story hit international headlines last week when her sentence was increased to six months in jail and 200 lashes after she spoke to the media.
Except for immediate family members, men and women cannot mix in Saudi Arabia, which applies a rigorous doctrine of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. Women must also cover themselves from head to toe in public and are banned from driving or travelling without permission from their male guardian.
The men were initially sentenced to one to five years in jail, but those terms were also increased last week to between two and nine years.
Their sentences fell short of the death penalty - which could be imposed in a rape conviction - due to the "lack of witnesses" and the "absence of confessions," the justice ministry said on Tuesday.
"The judge does not have a written law. It is a matter of luck. You are lucky if the judge is a moderate and fears God," said Hweider, an outspoken US-educated activist who leads a group of women demanding the right to drive.
Hatoon al-Fassi, a history lecturer at King Saud university in Riyadh and another women rights activist, agreed that women suffer from the lack of written laws, which subjects rulings to the discretion of judges.
"It all depends on the reasoning of the judge," she told AFP.
"It is good that the case has taken an international dimension. It is shameful that such a case could have stayed unspoken of ... This is a ruling that has treated the victim as a culprit," she said.
"Such logic is so distant from Islam. It is the result of a male-chauvinist reasoning," she charged.
Hweider highlighted the humiliation faced by women inside the courtroom, saying that a judge, who is always a clergyman, addresses only her male guardian.
"The woman does not have the right to represent herself in a court. She enters the court covered entirely in black. Some judges do not even allow her to speak," she said.
She pointed out cases of forgery where men took women to court to impersonate others only to make false claims. "It helped some men in stripping their sisters of inheritance, for example," she said.
A male guardian, who could be the woman's father, brother, husband, uncle, son, grandfather or grandson, literally controls her life.
"A woman is treated always as a minor and as a second-class citizen. She needs a male guardian," Fassi said.
She pointed out that she even needs her male guardian to obtain her identity card or passport and that women are not allowed to enter government departments.
"Here, the son is the male guardian of his mother if she is a widow or divorced. She would need his written approval for anything ... She has no value," said Hweider.
Although she acknowledges that some Saudi women have been successful in some professions, she said that a woman "would lose everything if the male guardian decided that she had to stay home."
"And for a Saudi judge, I am part of the property of my male guardian," she lamented.
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