 | ||
| ||
1,056 seats in 285 municipalities | ||
|---|---|---|
 |
|---|
|
| Basic Law |
 Saudi Arabiaportal |
Municipal elections in Saudi Arabian towns and cities, initially planned for 31 October 2009, [1] were held on 29 September 2011 [2] (a week after the initial date of 22 September 2011). [3] Women were not allowed to participate in the elections. [1] [4] [5] Women campaigned for the right to participate in the official elections [6] and planned to create parallel municipal councils. [7]
Municipal elections were originally planned to be held on 31 October 2009 in Saudi Arabia. [1] The elections were not held in 2009. Governmental authorities stated that the delay was caused by the need to "expand the electorate and study the possibility of allowing women to vote." [1] Associated Press described the announcement that an election would be held in 2011 as having "coincided with rumblings of dissent in Saudi Arabia stemming from the wave of political unrest in the Arab world." [1] On 22–23 March 2011, officials of the Ministry of Municipal and Rural affairs announced that the elections would be held on 22 September 2011. [3]
Half of the local council seats were to be decided in the election and the other half were to be appointed. [1] [4] The councils have "little power". [1] [4]
Voter registration took place from 23 April to 19 May [1] [3] [4] [8] [9] or 28 July. [10] Candidate registration took place from 28 May to 2 June. [3]
The period of electoral campaigning was to be decided after candidate registration had closed. [3] The municipal councils were to be created in October, following the election, for a term of 6 years. [3]
The Ministry of Municipal and Rural affairs set up an 11-member electoral commission, headed by Abdul-Rahman al-Dahmash [1] [4] and an executive committee that "will facilitate the operations of the special electoral commission, and [will] take all the necessary measures to ensure the success of the municipal elections." [3]
In late March, the Ministry of Municipal and Rural affairs stated that women would not vote in the 2011 elections "because of the kingdom's social customs". [1] King Saud University history lecturer and human rights activist Hatoon al-Fassi involved in campaigning for women's participation in elections stated that women had decided to create their own municipal councils in parallel to the men-only elections. [7] Al-Fassi stated that women creating their own municipal councils or participating in "real elections" were both legal under Saudi law and electoral commission head al-Dahmash agreed with her. [7]
Saudi Arabian women organised through the "Baladi" (My Country) and Saudi Women's Revolution [11] to campaign for women's participation in the election. [6] From 23–25 April, women in Jeddah, [12] Riyadh and Dammam tried to register as electors. The Gulf News said that "strong public opinion ... supporting women's participation in the election process" followed local newspapers' publication of photos of women waiting in queues to register for the election. Fawzia Al Hani, chair of the "Baladi" Facebook campaign, said that Saudi Arabian law states that women have the right to vote and to stand as candidates. [9] [13]
One of the women whose registration had been rejected, Samar Badawi, filed a lawsuit in the Grievances Board, a non-Sharia court, [14] against the Ministry of Municipal and Rural affairs, claiming that there was no law banning women as voters or candidates and that the refusal was illegal. She cited Articles 3 and 24 of the Arab Charter on Human Rights, which refer to general and election-specific anti-discrimination, respectively. Badawi requested the Grievances Board to suspend the electoral procedures pending the Board's decision and to order the electoral authorities to register her as a voter and as eligible to be a candidate. On 27 April 2011, the Grievances Board accepted to hear her case at a later date. [15] The Board's final decision was that Badawi's case was "premature". [16] According to the United States Department of State, Badawi was the first person to file a lawsuit for women's suffrage in Saudi Arabia. [17]
Badawi also applied to the Municipal Elections Appeal Committee to reverse the refusal of her registration. Her application was refused on the grounds that appeals against registration refusals must take place within three days of the refusal. [16]
In an annual speech on 25 September 2011 before the Shura Council, King Abdullah stated that Saudi women would be able to run and cast ballots in the 2015 municipal elections. [18]
The elections covered 1056 seats in the councils of 285 [5] [19] municipalities around Saudi Arabia.
The politics of Saudi Arabia takes place in the context of a unitary absolute monarchy, along traditional Islamic lines, where the King is both the head of state and government. Decisions are, to a large extent, made on the basis of consultation among the King, the Council of Ministers, Islamic scholars, tribal leaders and other traditional elites of the society. Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian state, with some scholars characterizing it as totalitarian. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, is the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. Under his rule, he has centralized policymaking, purged competing political elites, and dismantled pre-existing power-sharing dynamics.
Open list describes any variant of party-list proportional representation where voters have at least some influence on the order in which a party's candidates are elected. This is as opposed to closed list, which allows only active members, party officials, or consultants to determine the order of its candidates and gives the general voter no influence at all on the position of the candidates placed on the party list.
Election law is a branch of public law that relates to the democratic processes, election of representatives and office holders, and referendums, through the regulation of the electoral system, voting rights, ballot access, election management bodies, election campaign, the division of the territory into electoral zones, the procedures for the registration of voters and candidacies, its financing and propaganda, voting, counting of votes, scrutiny, electoral disputes, electoral observation and all contentious matters derived from them. It is a discipline falling at the juncture of constitutional law and political science, and involves "the politics of law and the law of politics".
Elections in Chile are held nationwide, including the presidency, parliament, regional offices, and municipal positions. Chilean citizens and foreign residents with legal residency of at least five years, who are 18 years or older on election day, are eligible to vote. Previously, voting was voluntary, but since 2023, it has become compulsory.
Municipal elections for 178 municipalities were held in Saudi Arabia between 10 February and 21 April 2005. The first to be held in the country since the 1960s, the elections were held in three stages: the first on 10 February around the capital city of Riyadh, the second in the east and southwest on 3 March, and the third, in the north, on 21 April.
Elections in Bhutan are conducted at national (Parliamentary) and local levels. Suffrage is universal for citizens 18 and over, and under applicable election laws. In national elections, also known as the general elections, political party participation is mainly restricted to the lower house of Parliament, and by extension, to the executive nominated by its majority
Elections in Saudi Arabia are rare. Municipal elections were last held in 2015, the first time women had the right to vote and stand as candidates.
The Federal National Council (FNC) of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is an advisory quasi-parliamentary body in the UAE. The FNC consists of 40 members. Twenty of the members are indirectly elected by the hand-picked 33% of Emirati citizens who have voting rights through an electoral college, while the other twenty are appointed by the rulers of each emirate. According to Reuters, "the process of selecting the people who can either elect or be elected is opaque."
The protests in Saudi Arabia were part of the Arab Spring that started with the 2011 Tunisian revolution. Protests started with a self-immolation in Samtah and Jeddah street protests in late January 2011. Protests against anti-Shia discrimination followed in February and early March in Qatif, Hofuf, al-Awamiyah, and Riyadh. A Facebook organiser of a planned 11 March "Day of Rage", Faisal Ahmed Abdul-Ahad, was allegedly killed by Saudi security forces on 2 March, with several hundred people protesting in Qatif, Hofuf and al-Amawiyah on the day itself. Khaled al-Johani demonstrated alone in Riyadh, was interviewed by BBC Arabic Television, was detained in ʽUlaysha Prison, and became known online as "the only brave man in Saudi Arabia". Many protests over human rights took place in April 2011 in front of government ministry buildings in Riyadh, Ta'if and Tabuk and in January 2012 in Riyadh. In 2011, Nimr al-Nimr encouraged his supporters in nonviolent resistance.
The Human Rights First Society is a non-governmental and non-profit organisation which seeks to promote human rights in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is one of the few independent groups in Saudi Arabia monitoring human rights, along with the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, the Society for Development and Change and the Association for the Protection and Defense of Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia. The HRFS was initiated as an organisation dedicated to protecting and defending human rights in Saudi Arabia according to Islamic teachings. The HRFS stands for applying the rule of law, freedoms of expression and association, and abolishing all discrimination in Saudi society on the basis of gender or religious beliefs.
The Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA) is a Saudi Arabian human rights non-governmental organisation created in 2009. On 9 March 2013, the Saudi court sentenced two of its prominent leaders to at least 10 years in prison for "offences that included sedition and giving inaccurate information to foreign media", while dissolving the group. The association is also known in Arabic by its acronym HASEM.
General elections were held in Qatar for the first time on 2 October 2021, following an announcement by the Emir of Qatar on 22 August 2021. The elections for the Consultative Assembly were originally scheduled for the second half of 2013, but were postponed in June 2013 until at least 2016. In 2016 they were postponed again. Finally, in November 2020, Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani pledged to hold the election in October 2021.
Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi is a Saudi Arabian historian, author and women's rights activist. She is an associate professor of women's history at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, where she has been employed since 1989 and at the International Affairs Department at Qatar University. At the university, al-Fassi carries out historical research. Al-Fassi claims from her research into the pre-Islamic Arabian kingdom of Nabataea that women in the kingdom had more independence than women in modern Saudi Arabia. Al-Fassi was active in women's right to vote campaigns for the 2005 and 2011 municipal elections and was active in a similar campaign for the 2015 municipal elections. She was arrested in late June 2018 as part of a crackdown on women's activists and was released in early May 2019.
Elections were held in Saudi Arabia on 12 December 2015 for municipal councils, which have limited decision-making powers on local issues such as rubbish collection and street maintenance. The previous two elections, in 2005 and 2011, were for half the council seats and were open to male candidates and voters only. The 2015 election was for two thirds of the council seats, on 284 municipal councils, with both male and female candidates and voters. This was the first election in Saudi Arabia in which women were allowed to vote, the first in which they were allowed to run for office, and the first in which women were elected as politicians.
The following is a timeline of the 2011–2012 Saudi Arabian protests from January to April 2011. The 2011–2012 Saudi Arabian protests are a series of ongoing protests taking place in Saudi Arabia, which began in January 2011, influenced by concurrent protests in the region.
Samar bint Muhammad Badawi is a Saudi Arabian human rights activist. She and her father filed court cases against each other. Badawi's father accused her of disobedience under the Saudi Arabian male guardianship system and she charged her father with adhl—"making it hard or impossible for a person, especially a woman, to have what she wants, or what's rightfully hers; e.g, her right to marry" according to Islamic jurisprudence—for refusing to allow her to marry. After Badawi missed several trial dates relating to the charge, an arrest warrant was issued for her, and Badawi was imprisoned on 4 April 2010. In July 2010, Jeddah General Court ruled in Samar Badawi's favor, and she was released on 25 October 2010, and her guardianship was transferred to an uncle. There had been a local and international support campaign for her release. The Saudi NGO Human Rights First Society described Badawi's imprisonment as "outrageous illegal detention".
Women played a variety of roles in the Arab Spring, but its impact on women and their rights is unclear. The Arab Spring was a series of demonstrations, protests, and civil wars against authoritarian regimes that started in Tunisia and spread to much of the Arab world. The leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen were overthrown; Bahrain has experienced sustained civil disorder, and the protests in Syria have become a civil war. Other Arab countries experienced protests as well.
Saudi Arabia is a theocracy organized according to the principles of Islam, which puts emphasis on the importance of knowledge and education. In Islamic belief, obtaining knowledge is the only way to gain true understanding of life, and as such, both men and women are encouraged to study. Saudi Arabia is one of the G20 Economies and has a $1 Trillion GDP. In 2016, it launched one of the most significant programs globally - Vision 2030. In 2021, women's college graduation rates exceeded those of men's.
Nassima al-Sadah is a Shia human rights writer and activist from the "restive Shi'ite-majority" eastern province Qatif, Saudi Arabia. She has "campaigned for civil and political rights, women's rights and the rights of the Shi'a minority" in the eastern province Qatif, Saudi Arabia for many years. She ran as a candidate in the 2015 Saudi Arabian municipal elections but was disqualified. Sadah and another prominent activist, Samar Badawi, were arrested on July 30, 2018, by Saudi authorities in a broader "government crackdown" on "activists, clerics and journalists."
Feminism in Saudi Arabia dates back to the ancient, pre-Roman Nabataean Kingdom in which women were independent legal persons. Twenty-first century feminist movements in Saudi Arabia include the women to drive movement and the anti male-guardianship campaign. Madawi al-Rasheed argued in 2019 that the Saudi feminist movement was "the most organised and articulate civil society" in Saudi Arabia.
Part of the Arab Spring | |
| Timeline | |
| Events/Campaigns | |
| People | |
| Groups | |
| Places | |
| Related | |
