[Serious] G-20 leaders, don’t forget the women’s rights advocates rotting in Saudi prisons

[WinterHold]

G-20 leaders, don’t forget the women’s rights advocates rotting in Saudi prisons

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...story.html

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Hathloul, 31, is the best known of the at least 28 women’s rights advocates who have been jailed in Saudi Arabia since 2018. A number of them have been viciously tortured; none has been convicted of an offense. MBS’s bet is that his crimes against them, and their continuing suffering, will be ignored for the sake of an elite but all-but-meaningless confab; the G-20, formed at the time of the 2008 financial crisis, has accomplished nothing of import in the past decade.
That can’t be said of Hathloul, who while still in her early 20s became a leader of protests by Saudi women seeking the right to drive and an end to the system of male guardianship. Mohammed bin Salman, seeking global prestige and foreign investment, elected to lift the driving ban in June 2018 — but not before crushing those who had demanded the reform.

Hathloul, living in exile in the United Arab Emirates, was abducted from there in March 2018 and forcibly transported to the kingdom. She was briefly released, but on May 15, 2018, she and a number of other women were seized and taken to secret detention facilities, where they were held incommunicado for months and, according to their later accounts, badly tortured.
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Hathloul is still in prison in part because she bravely told her family and the official Saudi Human Rights Commission what happened: She was stripped, sexually abused, beaten, given electric shocks and waterboarded. Her torture was overseen by Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide to MBS, who threatened to personally rape and kill her.

In all, 14 women’s rights activists were arrested in 2018, and 14 more the following year, according to Alqst, a Saudi human rights group. But their cases were overshadowed by another MBS-ordered operation overseen by Qahtani: the murder and dismemberment of exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

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