A ladies’s rights activist and fitness influencer from Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 11 years in jail over her choice of clothes, human rights groups have claimed.
Manahel al-Otaibi was sentenced in January but details of her case only recently emerged after Saudi Arabia gave a proper reply to a United Nations human rights request.
Within the letter, Saudi Arabia outlined their case for arresting and charging the 29-year-old. They claimed she was arrested over “terrorist offences” – a story challenged by Amnesty International and Al Qst, a Saudi human rights group based mostly in London. The human rights teams warned that Ms Al-Otaibi was truly jailed over her choice of clothes and social media posts where she posted the hashtag “abolish male guardianship”.
Ms Al-Otaibi wore what had been deemed to be “indecent clothes” in videos and went shopping with out an abaya, a protracted gown, the groups stated.
Saudi Arabia claimed that Ms Al-Otaibi was “convicted of terrorist offences that don’t have any bearing on her exercise of freedom of opinion and expression or her social media posts”.
Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism law, below which Ms Al-Otaibi was convicted, has been criticised by the United Nations as a very broad tool to stifle dissent.
Bissan Fakih, Amnesty International’s campaigner on Saudi Arabia, stated: “Manahel’s conviction and 11-year sentence is an appalling and cruel injustice.
“With this sentence, the Saudi authorities have exposed the hollowness of their much-touted ladies’s rights reforms lately and demonstrated their chilling dedication to silencing peaceable dissent.”
Lina Alhathloul, Al Qst’s head of monitoring and advocacy, stated: “Manahel’s confidence that she might act with freedom might have been a positive advertisement for Mohammed bin Salman’s much-touted narrative of main ladies’s rights reforms within the country.
“As a substitute, by arresting her and now imposing this outrageous sentence on her, the Saudi authorities have as soon as once more laid naked the arbitrary and contradictory nature of their so-called reforms, and their persevering with willpower to regulate Saudi Arabia’s ladies.”
Saudi Arabia denied allegations from the human rights groups in its letter to the UN.
Ms Al-Otaibi was first arrested on 16 November 2022 and detained in a ladies’s jail in Riyadh, according to Saudi Arabia. She was eventually found guilty of “having committed terrorist offences” and handed her sentence on 9 January 2024.
Nevertheless, the charity teams stated that Ms Al-Otaibi “forcibly disappeared” from November 2023 till April 2024, when she was in a position to contact her family again. She told them she was being held in solitary confinement and had a broken leg following alleged bodily abuse.
Her sister, Fawzia al Otaibi, additionally faced similar charges but fled Saudi Arabia after being summoned for questioning in 2022, fearing arrest.
