Human rights in Saudi Arabia are a topic of concern and controversy. The Saudi government, which mandates both Muslim and non-Muslim observance of Islamic law under the absolute rule of the House of Saud, has been accused of and denounced by various international organizations and governments for violating human rights within the country. The authoritarian regime ruling the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is consistently ranked among the "worst of the worst" in Freedom House's annual survey of political and civil rights.
The Ministry of Interior and General Investigation, commonly known simply as the Mabahith, is the secret police agency of the Presidency of State Security in Saudi Arabia, and deals with domestic security and counter-intelligence.
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.
Eman al-Nafjan is a Saudi Arabian blogger and women's rights activist. She was detained by Saudi authorities in May 2018 along with Loujain al-Hathloul and five other women's rights activists in what Human Rights Watch interpreted as an attempt to frighten her and the other activists, during the 2018–2019 Saudi crackdown on feminists.
Until June 2018, Saudi Arabia was the only country in the world in which women were forbidden from driving motor vehicles. The Women to Drive Movement was a campaign by Saudi women, whom the government denies many rights to which men are entitled, for the right to drive motor vehicles on public roads. Dozens of women drove in Riyadh in 1990 and were arrested and had their passports confiscated. In 2007, Wajeha al-Huwaider and other women petitioned King Abdullah for the right to drive, and a film of al-Huwaider driving on International Women's Day 2008 attracted international media attention.
The following is a timeline of the 2011–2012 Saudi Arabian protests from May to December 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".
Ayatollah Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, commonly referred to as Sheikh Nimr, was a Shia sheikh from Al-Awamiyah in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province whose arrest and execution was widely condemned, including by governments and human rights organizations.
The Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) is a non-Sharia court created in Saudi Arabia in 2008 that tries suspected terrorists and human rights activists. On 26 June 2011, the court started trials of 85 people suspected of being involved in Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the 2003 Riyadh compound bombings and in September 2011 another 41 al-Qaeda suspects appeared in the court. In the same year, the court held trial sessions of human rights activists, including co-founder Mohammed Saleh al-Bejadi of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA) and Mubarak Zu'air, a lawyer for long-term prisoners, and Khaled al-Johani, who spoke to BBC Arabic Television at a protest in Riyadh, thus becoming known as "the bravest man in Saudi Arabia". The court convicted 16 of the human rights activists to sentences of 5–30 years' imprisonment on 22 November 2011.
Mohammed Saleh al-Bejadi is a co-founder of the Saudi Arabian human rights organisation Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA) who has campaigned for prisoners' rights since 2007. He spent four months in prison without charge or trial in 2007 and was banned from foreign travel in 2009.
Dissidents have been detained as political prisoners in Saudi Arabia during the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Protests and sit-ins calling for political prisoners to be released took place during the 2011–2012 Saudi Arabian protests in many cities throughout Saudi Arabia, with security forces firing live bullets in the air on 19 August 2012 at a protest at al-Ha'ir Prison. As of 2012, recent estimates of the number of political prisoners in Mabahith prisons range from a denial of any political prisoners at all by the Ministry of Interior, to 30,000 by the UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission and the BBC.
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.
Waleed Sami Abulkhair is a Saudi Arabian lawyer and human rights activist, and the head of the Monitor of Human Rights in Saudi Arabia (MHRSA) organization. He is the first activist to be prosecuted by the Terrorism Law. He was arrested on 15 April 2014, and was sent to al-Ha'ir Prison while awaiting prosecution. On 6 July 2014, Abulkhair was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Specialized Criminal Court, and a travel ban for another 15 years, in addition to a fine of 200,000 riyals (US$53,333). On 12 January 2015, the case returned to the Court of Appeals, after which the judge requested increasing the previous sentence, because Abulkhair refused to apologize. Thus, the judgment was tightened to 15-year executed. In response, Abulkhair prayed for God's victory and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Specialized Criminal Court. Abulkhair is incarcerated in the Dhahban Central Prison in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a facility used to hold high-profile political prisoners, as well as members of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Loujain al-Hathloul is a Saudi women's rights activist, a social media figure, and political prisoner. She is a graduate of the University of British Columbia. Al-Hathloul has been arrested and released on several occasions for defying the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia and was arrested in May 2018, with several prominent women's rights activists, on the charge of "attempting to destabilise the kingdom" after being effectively kidnapped in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). As of October 2018, her husband, Saudi stand-up comedian Fahad al-Butairi, had also been forcibly returned from Jordan to the Kingdom and was under arrest.
Madeha al-Ajroush is a Saudi Arabian women's rights activist, psychologist and photographer. She was detained by Saudi authorities in May 2018 along with Loujain al-Hathloul and five others.
Aziza al-Yousef is a Saudi Arabian women's rights activist and academic. She was detained by Saudi authorities in May 2018 along with Loujain al-Hathloul and five others.
The anti male-guardianship campaign is an ongoing campaign by Saudi women against the requirement to obtain permission from their male guardian for activities such as getting a job, travelling internationally or getting married. Wajeha al-Huwaider deliberately tried to travel internationally without male guardianship permission in 2009 and encouraged other women to do likewise. Women activists wrote a letter to the Saudi Minister of Labor and brought media attention to the issue in 2011. A 14,000-signature petition was given to royal authorities by Aziza al-Yousef in 2016 following a Human Rights Watch report on male guardianship. A crackdown against the activists took place in mid-May 2018, with 13 arrests as of 22 May 2018. Several of the women remained in prison as of December 2018. Some of the women activists were tortured, including supervision by Saud al-Qahtani, a close advisor of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
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."
The 2018–2019 Saudi crackdown on feminists consisted of waves of arrests of women's rights activists in Saudi Arabia involved in the women to drive movement and the Saudi anti male-guardianship campaign and of their supporters during 2018 and 2019. The crackdown was described in June 2018 by a United Nations special rapporteur as taking place "on a wide scale across" Saudi Arabia; the special rapporteur called for the "urgent release" of the detainees. Six of the women arrestees were tortured, some in the presence of Crown Prince advisor Saud al-Qahtani.
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.
