SAUDI RAPE/ LASHING CASE PROVOKES CALLS FOR REFORMS
Anyone taking bets that this will happen? Or are we going to have another spate of fatwahs declared again those taking a stand?
By RASHEED ABOU-ALSAMH
The case of a 20-year-old woman who was sentenced to be lashed after pressing charges against seven men who raped her and a male companion has provoked a rare and angry public debate in Saudi Arabia, leading to renewed calls for reform of the Saudi judicial system.
The woman, known here only as the Qatif girl because she comes from the Eastern town of that name, was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being alone with a man to whom she was not married.
Her outspoken human rights lawyer appealed the sentence and brought down the wrath of the court, which doubled the woman’s sentence and stripped her lawyer of his license to practice.
The case is now being appealed to the kingdom’s highest court. Human rights activists said the treatment of the woman, the man who was raped with her and her lawyer calls into question Saudi justice and make a mockery of the courts’ claim to fairness.
“The system has to be transformed from top to bottom,” said Ali Alyami, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia. “Judges in Saudi Arabia have no more power than the princes want them to have.”The Saudi legal system is based on a strict Wahabi interpretation of Islamic law. Like all institutions here, it is subject to the absolute authority of the monarchy.
Saudi officials have faced a firestorm of embarrassing international publicity. American presidential candidates denounced the sentence on the campaign trail. During the Annapolis peace conference this week, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, faced a barrage of questions about the case and promised that the judiciary would review it.
The rape took place a year and a half ago in Qatif, a small Shiite town in the Eastern Province, center of the Saudi Arabia’s oil industry. Judges there provoked outrage in many quarters in the kingdom — and vociferous criticism abroad — when they increased the sentence on appeal in mid-November.
In the weeks since then, government authorities have ordered the woman’s lawyer, Abdulrahman al-Lahem, a well-known human rights activist, to stop talking to the news media, and issued similar orders to the woman and her husband.
The Ministry of Justice and two prominent judges have harshly criticized the woman, suggesting that she was engaged in immoral behavior at the time of the attack.
The Justice Ministry published two statements on its Web site in recent days, saying that the woman had confessed to engaging in illicit acts and was undressed in a car before the rape.
Mr. Lahem, her lawyer, denied these accusations and said neither she or her male friend had confessed to any such acts. The lawyer is now suing the Ministry of Information and Culture for having distributed the Justice Ministry’s statements to the news media through the state-run Saudi Press Agency.
Human Rights Watch issued a statement this week insisting that the Justice Ministry “stop publishing statements aimed at damaging the reputation of a young Saudi rape victim who spoke out publicly about her ordeal and her efforts to find justice.” The ministry stopped short of accusing the rape victim of adultery, or zina in Arabic, which could carry the death penalty, for being alone with the man whom she met in his car on the night of the rape in 2006.
Mr. Lahem has complained that the judges seem to have based their conclusions about the events on the night of the rape on testimony of the seven rapists, who have been sentenced to five to seven years in jail. Under Islamic law, two people can be accused of adultery only if caught in the act by four male witnesses of good character.
Ibrahim bin Salih al-Khudairi, a judge on the Riyadh Appeals Court, said in an interview in the newspaper Okaz on Nov. 27 that if he had been a judge in the Qatif court, he would have sentenced the woman, her male companion and the seven rapists to death, and that they were lucky not to get the death penalty.
The woman met with an Associated Press reporter in November, before the court ordered her and her lawyer to stop talking to reporters. Describing the sentence as a “big shock,” she said that she had trouble sleeping and that her hands were trembling, The A.P. reported.
Farida Deif, a Human Rights Watch researcher, interviewed the woman in December 2006. Her report directly contradicts the version of the events put forward by Saudi justice officials.
In her interview with the human rights group, the woman said she had given a photo of herself to a male friend. Years later, when she was 19 and engaged to another man, she asked for the photo back. She agreed to meet him in his car in downtown Qatif. Another car blocked their path when they were 15 minutes from her house, she said.
“Two people got out of their car and stood on either side of our car,” she said. “The man on my side had a knife. I screamed.”
She and her companion were taken to a building in Awwamiyah, a working-class neighborhood of Qatif, where they were raped repeatedly by seven men over several hours, she said.
Mr. Lahem, the lawyer, had his license suspended for “disrespecting” the court after he supposedly raised his voice in court. He faces a disciplinary hearing in Riyadh on Dec. 5.
He said that he had not wanted to make waves about the case but that the doubling of the punishment had forced him to go public. He had hoped to keep things quiet, he said, and then apply for a royal pardon from King Abdullah, who has pardoned convicted human rights advocates in the past. That may still happen.
Neither Mr. Lahem nor the woman’s husband has been given a copy of the verdict despite repeated requests, which has delayed filing of the appeal.
Yet a copy of it was apparently leaked to Alsaha, a conservative Saudi Web site.
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