Saudi Arabia will not end the world’s only ban on women driving cars.
Despite moves towards rights for women under King Abdullah before his death, deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud has said the Saudi community “is not convinced about women driving”.
The defence minister and favourite son of the current king, who is suffering from dementia, has been accused of influencing Saudi policy from the wings since his father came to the throne last January.
The German intelligence agency BND published a memoir which said the prince’s concentration of power into his own hands “harbours a latent risk that in seeking to establish himself in the line of succession in his father’s lifetime, he may overreach”.
Yet he said most recently that the “community” still thinks allowing women to drive will have negative consequences.
When asked why Saudi Arabia has one of the lowest rates of women in the workforce in the world he said: “[The woman] is not used to working. She needs more time to accustom herself to the idea of work.”
“A large percentage of Saudi women are used to the fact of staying at home. They’re not used to being working women. It just takes time“, he said,
Women in Saudi Arabia cannot open a bank account without their husband’s permission or leave the home without a male guardian known as a “mahram”.
The Shoura Council in the country, the king’s advisory body, recently ruled that female television presenters should not “show off their beauty”, while a young woman who was raped while out by herself received more lashes in punishment than one of her attackers.
HUMAN RIGHTS
Saudi Arabia has long been criticised for its harsh social codes and punishments, imposed under its puritanical version of Sharia law.
Beheading:
Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in February 2012 when he was just 17 and accused of organising protests. He was sentenced to death by beheading and crucifixion, along with his uncle, a leading Shia cleric. Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, said last month he did not expect the sentence to be carried out. However, murderers, drug dealers and others convicted on purely criminal charges are often beheaded in public.
Womens’ rights:
While women did in 2105 get to register to vote and can stand for local elections, they are still required to have permission from a “guardian” such as a father, husband or brother to travel freely. Wearing modest clothes and a headscarf in public is compulsory. They are also banned from driving – subject of the country’s most visible civil disobedience campaign in recent years.
The regime in Saudi Arabia has been strongly criticized by human rights organizations.
Saudi Arabia has been compared to Daesh in long time now, especially for their support of terrorist organizations in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Hashtags #SueMeSaudi and #SaudiArabiaIsISIS has many hits every minute, and many want to mark their opposition and to show their distance to the brutal dictator regime in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia practice Wahhabism ideology, a strictly fundamentalist orientation within Sunni Islam, which in practice is the state religion in the country. It is also ideology direction that has inspired al-Qaida and DAESH.
