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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 Saudi Arabia are rare. Municipal elections were last held in 2015, the first time women had the right to vote and stand as candidates.
Saleh Abdullah Kamel was a Saudi billionaire businessman. He had a net worth estimated at US$2.3 billion, as of March 2017. He was the chairman and founder of the Dallah al Baraka Group (DBHC), one of the Middle East's largest conglomerates. He was also the chairman of the General Council for Islamic Banks and the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce.
Ghazi Abdul Rahman Al Gosaibi was a Saudi politician, diplomat, technocrat, poet, and novelist. He was an intellectual and a member of the Al Gosaibi family that is one of the oldest and richest trading families of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Al Gosaibi was considered among Saudi Arabia's topmost technocrats since the mid-1970s. The Majalla called him the "Godfather of Renovation" while Saudi journalist Othman Al Omeir argued that he was "the only great man in Saudi Arabia."
The Jeddah Chamber of Commerce & Industry (JCCI) is the chamber of commerce in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Abdul Majeed bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was a Saudi Arabian politician and businessman who served successively as the governor of the Tabuk, Medina, and Mecca provinces between 1980 and 2007. A prominent member of the House of Saud, Abdul Majeed was seen as a close ally of King Abdullah, but was also regarded as a long-time ally of the Sudairi Seven.
Women's rights in Saudi Arabia are a topic of concern and controversy internationally. Saudi women have experienced major rights reforms since 2017, after facing religious fundamentalist dominance dating from 1979.
Adila bint Abdullah Al Saud is a member of the Saudi royal family. During the reign of her father, King Abdullah, she was one of the women who could influence the political development of Saudi Arabia in women-related areas such as education, employment and health.
Municipal elections in Saudi Arabian towns and cities, initially planned for 31 October 2009, were held on 29 September 2011. Women were not allowed to participate in the elections. Women campaigned for the right to participate in the official elections and planned to create parallel municipal councils.
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.
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.
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".
Adel Fakeih is a Saudi Arabian engineer and the former mayor of Jeddah. He was the minister of labor from August 2010 to April 2015, minister of health between April 2014 and December 2014, and minister of economy and planning between 2015 and 2017. He has been in detention since November 2017.
Women's sport in Saudi Arabia has been a controversial topic for many years due to the suppression of female participation in sport by conservative Islamic religious authorities.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
There has been an increase in public galleries exhibiting modern art in Saudi Arabia. This is supported by the influx of commercial galleries in the country and a growing grass-roots movement of artists which have acquired international status. Saudi Arabia is making its mark on the contemporary art scene and at the centre of this are women. These artists are noted for pushing at existing boundaries in the socially conservative country. Their work is largely feminist in nature—posing questions on the current political climate and women’s rights. They question existing parameters and challenge proposed gender roles and social norms and use art to express injustices in order to give voice to an otherwise marginalized group.
Bayan Mahmoud Al-Zahran is one of the first four female attorneys in Saudi Arabia.
Sofana R. Dahlan is an accomplished Saudi lawyer and social entrepreneur. She holds the prized distinction of being among the first three female lawyers to have been granted the permit to practice law in Saudi Arabia and has served as a legal consultant in different parts of the Arab world including Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Kuwait. Dahlan was also the Vice Governor for Entrepreneurship Advancement at the Small and Medium Enterprises Authority of Saudi Arabia from 2016 to 2017, making her the first Saudi female senior economic policymaker. Most recently she has enrolled at King's College, London in order to pursue a PhD in Culture Media and Creative Industries specialising in: The Obstacles Facing the Development of Creative Industries in Saudi Arabia: A Deep Dive into Intellectual Property Infringement and its Implications.
Aisha al-Mana is a Saudi activist and feminist who has participated both in demonstrations against the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia and in the anti male-guardianship campaign. She also works as director of the Al-Mana General Hospitals and the Mohammad al-Mana College of Health Sciences, and is a board member of Ebrahim M. Almana and Brothers.
References
- ↑ "ﻨﻅﺭﺓ ﻋﺎﻤﺔ". Archived from the original on 2013-09-18. Retrieved 2013-09-28.
- 1 2 "Jeddah's Who's Who Fatin Bundagji: A Lady With A Message". Archived from the original on 2013-09-28.
- ↑ What if Saudi Arabia Threw an Election for Women and Nobody Came? Foreign Policy
- ↑ "3 Women Nominate Themselves for Municipal Elections". Arab News