Saudi officials confirmed in a statement to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights that Manahel al-Otaibi was sentenced on 9 January for what the Saudi government called “terrorist offences”.
Al-Otaibi, who was sentenced in a secret hearing before the counter-terrorism court, was found guilty of charges related to a Saudi anti-terror law that criminalises the use of websites to “broadcasts or publishes news, statements, false or malicious rumors, or the like for committing a terrorist crime”.
Among other charges, Otaibi was accused by Saudi authorities of using a hashtag – translated to #societyisready – to call for an end to male guardianship rules. Her sister, Fouz al-Otaibi was also accused of not wearing decent clothing but was able to flee Saudi Arabia before her arrest.
Another sister, Maryam, is a known women’s rights advocate who was detained, held, and eventually released in 2017 for protesting guardianship rules.
Rights groups say al-Otaibi has been subjected to severe abuse, beginning with her forcible disappearance for five months from November 2023 to April 2024. Once she was back in contact with her family, she said she was held in solitary confinement and had broken a leg after being subjected to physical abuse. Saudi officials denied the claims.
Her case follows a slew of similar cases in which Saudi women, in particular, have been subjected to draconian sentences for using social media accounts to express themselves. They include women such as Salma al-Shehab, sentenced to 27 years, Fatima al-Shawarbi, sentenced to 30 years, Sukaynah al-Aithan, sentenced to 40 years, and Nourah al-Qahtani, sentenced to 45 years.
There are so many problems with Saudi Arabia, but because they have money and oil, nobody dares do anything. If we could decouple ourselves from their damn oil, maybe we could have more influence on them.
If you want equal rights for women in Saudi Arabia, try your best to stop depending on their major export: oil.
Plastic is oil, and everything has plastic.
try your best
Oh, thoughts and prayers. Got it.
Oh, “I won’t do anything to change my behavior because I don’t care”. Got it
I’m not delusional. That part of the world has treated women like shit long before there was oil flowing. They will treat them like shit long after. They will not change just because they stop making money. In fact, they would probably get worse.
You don’t have to be delusional to self-sacrifice to try to make a difference. I’m so sick of people pretending like there is nothing they could possibly do to help, so they just keep hurting others. It’s just like every discussion on factory farms. At least try to help. It will make you feel better, and you can quit getting all defensive when people point out things that can be done.
Try to help the environment? Yes. To help women in Saudi Arabia? No.
Not all plastic is oil, there was plenty of non-oil based plastics before WW2:
https://plasticseurope.org/plastics-explained/history-of-plastics/
Even after WW2, there have been advances in non-oil plastics. They haven’t disappeared, they’re all still here… just overwhelmed by the mountain of “get rich quick” scams that are throwaway plastics.
And plastic was not even intended to be throwaway! Over the years it got engineered to sell as many units for as high a profit as possible… and what better way than selling single-use easy-to-break plastic products.
Still, if all oil production stopped right now, we wouldn’t run out of ways to make plastics, just out of ways to produce cheap plastic waste.
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