Women in Saudi Arabia have made some progress in participating in sports for health, competition, and professional opportunities but serious barriers remain.
On the eve of the Rio Olympics, the Saudi government, including the new women’s section of the Saudi sports authority, should remove the remaining barriers to sports in schools, businesses, federations, and team sports.
Four women will represent the country in Rio, a slight improvement from the two who competed in the 2012 London Summer Olympics. But inside Saudi Arabia, widespread discrimination still hampers access to sports for Saudi women and girls, including in public education. This exists against a backdrop of pervasive discrimination that constrains women’s day-to-day lives in Saudi Arabia. Women are not allowed to travel abroad, marry, or be released from prison without a male guardian’s permission, and may be required to provide guardian consent to work or get health care. They are not allowed to drive.
“Saudi women are making tremendous strides in the world of sports – climbing the tallest mountains and swimming the lengths of rivers,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives. “They are showing their determination, talent, effort, and heart despite daunting legal, cultural, and religious hurdles. As the Rio Olympics open, Saudi Arabia needs to change the game by addressing the profound discrimination that holds back women’s and girls’ participation in sport in the kingdom.”
Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system remains the most significant impediment to women’s rights in the country despite limited reforms over the last decade, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
Adult women must obtain permission from a male guardian to travel abroad, marry, or be released from prison, and may be required to provide guardian consent to work or get health care. These restrictions last from birth until death, as women are, in the view of the Saudi state, permanent legal minors.The 79-page report, “Boxed In: Women and Saudi Arabia’s Male Guardianship System,” examines in detail the panoply of formal and informal barriers women in Saudi Arabia face when attempting to make decisions or take action without the presence or consent of a male relative. As one 25-year-old Saudi woman told Human Rights Watch, “We all have to live in the borders of the boxes our dads or husbands draw for us.” In some cases, men use the permission requirements to extort large sums of money from female dependents.
Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system remains the most significant impediment to women’s rights in the country despite limited reforms over the last decade.
“The fact that Saudi women are still forced to get a male guardian’s permission to travel, work, or do anything else is a long-standing rights violation and a barrier to the government’s plans to improve the economy,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director. “The government should do itself a favor and finally listen to the demands of half its population to be freed from the shackles of the guardianship system.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 61 Saudi women and men for the report and analyzed Saudi laws, policies, and official documents. Every Saudi woman must have a male guardian, normally a father or husband, but in some cases a brother or even a son, who has the power to make a range of critical decisions on her behalf.
“My son is my guardian, believe it or not, and this is really humiliating… My own son, the one I delivered, the one I raised, he is my guardian,” a 62-year old Saudi woman told Human Rights Watch. A woman’s other male relatives also have authority over her, although to a lesser extent.
Women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia have repeatedly called on the government to abolish the male guardianship system. In 2009, and again in 2013, Saudi Arabia agreed after its universal periodic review at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Since making these promises, Saudi Arabia has taken steps to lessen guardians’ control over women, including no longer requiring permission for women to work and passing a law criminalizing domestic abuse. In 2013, then-King Abdullah appointed 30 women to the Shura Council, his highest advisory body, and, in 2015, women voted and ran as candidates in municipal council elections for the first time.
Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system remains the most significant impediment to women’s rights in the country despite limited reforms over the last decade.
Despite these limited steps, the male guardianship system remains largely in place, hindering and in some cases nullifying the reforms, Human Rights Watch found.
Women may not apply for a passport without male guardian approval and require permission to travel outside the country. They regularly face difficulty conducting a range of transactions without a male relative, from renting an apartment to filing legal claims. The government does not require guardian permission for women to work, but does not penalize employers who do require this permission. Women cannot study abroad on a government scholarship without guardian approval, and a male relative must accompany her abroad while she studies, though this requirement is not always enforced. Women are barred from driving.
Women face tremendous obstacles when trying to seek help or flee abuse by violent guardians, Human Rights Watch found. For example, a husband retains guardianship control even during divorce proceedings. There is deeply entrenched discrimination within the legal system, and courts recognize legal claims brought by guardians against female dependents to enforce their authority.
Women who have escaped abuse in shelters may, and in prisons do, require a male relative to agree to their release. “The [authorities] keep a woman in jail… until her legal guardian comes and gets her, even if he is the one who put her in jail,” said a women’s rights activist. If a guardian refuses to release a woman from prison, authorities may transfer her to a state shelter or arrange a marriage for her. Her new husband becomes her new guardian.
Human Rights Watch spoke with women who felt their only safe option was to leave the country after male family members abused and threatened them, but who were unable to convince their guardians, in some cases the abusers, to allow them to travel.
Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system remains the most significant impediment to women’s rights in the country despite limited reforms over the last decade.
The guardianship system is grounded in the most restrictive interpretation of an ambiguous Quranic verse – an interpretation challenged by dozens of Saudi women, including academics and Islamic feminists, who spoke to Human Rights Watch. A former Saudi judge told Human Rights Watch the country’s imposition of guardianship is not required by Sharia, or Islamic law.
Saudi Arabia, which acceded to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 2000, is legally obligated to end discrimination against women without delay, including by abolishing the male guardianship system.
The World Congress of Families, a global network of organizations that oppose LGBT equality and legal access to abortion, will hold its annual summit in Tbilisi, capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, beginning on Sunday, May 15.
This year’s summit is likely to feature a particular focus on siding with Putin’s Russia and the Orthodox Church as defenders of “Christian civilization” against a secular, decadent West. Georgia, which joined the Council of Europe in 1999, is front and center in what many of these activists see as a civilizational battle. Last October the EU and Council of Europe recommended policy changes to strengthen human rights protections in Georgia; the action plan to achieve them was launched this week. Back in 2014, with the encouragement of the EU, Georgia adopted a sweeping nondiscrimination law, which infuriated people like the WCF summit’s chair, businessman and philanthropist Levan Vasadze, who called the law part of “an international agenda” to “destroy the family.”
An anti-Western quote from Vasadze has been featured on the WCF home page this week:
The West is attacking our Christian culture with atheism, new forms of socialism and sexual radicalism — worse than what we saw during the last 25 years when we were part of the Soviet empire. This is why we need you to come to Tbilisi and work with us.
TEHRAN — Minoo Khaleghi easily won a seat in the Iranian Parliament in February, part of a wave of independents and reformists who now have the numbers to wrest authority from the hard-liners. On Wednesday, however, a powerful state committee demonstrated that the conservative forces would not relinquish power without a fight.
Citing “evidence” that had emerged against her, the Dispute Settlement Committee of Branches, a part of Iran’s generally conservative judiciary, ruled that Ms. Khaleghi could not be sworn in as a new member of Parliament, the semiofficial Fars News Agency reported. The evidence, it turned out, consisted of photographs of Ms. Khaleghi, “leaked” on social media last week, showing her in public in Europe and in China without the obligatory Islamic head scarf. Hard-liners immediately accused her of “betraying the nation.”
But opposition-aligned analysts and Ms. Khaleghi shot back that the case against her was politically motivated, more about curtailing and marginalizing prominent reformists — and a woman — than about her traveling abroad without a head scarf.
While acknowledging that all Iranian women are obliged to cover themselves in public, even when traveling abroad, they said there was a problem with the evidence. The photographs were, Ms. Khaleghi said in a statement to the official government newspaper Iran, malicious fakes.
More than a dozen adult men have been arrested in rural Pakistan for drugging a 16-year-old girl and then setting her on fire for helping a friend elope.
The men drugged her before they burned her alive.
More than a dozen members of an “honor council” near the Pakistani towns of Makol and Dunga Gali, outside of Abbottabad, have been arrested for immolating a 16-year-old girl, according to a local police chief.
Her supposed crime: helping a friend elope, which the men allegedly said had done irreparable harm to their village’s reputation.
The group of men, described as a jirga or local tribal council by police, detained the girl, her mother, and her brother, according to police chief Saeed Wazir. The latter two allegedly consented to the punishment: burning the girl, named in some reports as Ambreen or Haleema, in the van used by the couple to elope.
“The jirga members… decided to punish the girl in a novel way so no one in future can dare to marry without consent of their parents and give a bad name to the village,” Wazirtold NBC. “They tied her hands with the seats and then poured [gasoline] on her and the vehicle and set it on fire.”
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The term jirga, Khan told The Daily Beast, can just mean “a mediator, and that can be even one person” in that region. It doesn’t have to be a formal body, as suggested in many news reports.
Second summons issued against human rights defender Shaikha Binjasim
On 19 April 2016, human rights defender Ms Shaikha Binjasim received a second summons in relation to new charges of blasphemy and humiliating the religion of the State. The human rights defender has been asked to report to the public prosecutor’s office on Sunday morning, 24 April 2016, in the Houli area, Kuwait City. If charged, Shaikha Binjasim could face up to one year’s imprisonment under blasphemy law.
On 14 April 2016, in a separate investigation, Shaikha Binjasim appeared before the public prosecutor, who charged her with blasphemy and humiliating the religion of the State for having declared in a television interview on the Kuwaiti channel Al-Shahed, that the constitution of Kuwait is above the Quran and Shari’a.
E.S. had been married for 10 years when her husband died. Almost overnight, her life—and her three young children’s—collapsed. E.S.’s in-laws kicked her out of her modest home in Tanzania. She and her children took refuge with her parents. Another widow in Tanzania, S.C., and her infant were also ordered out of their home, in that case too by in-laws.
Under the customary inheritance laws of many communities in Tanzania, a widow with children inherits nothing from her husband. These laws also deny women the right to inherit clan land or to be administrators of their relatives’ estates. Sons inherit clan land and the largest share of personal property, while daughters get no clan land and the smallest share of personal property.
E.S. and S.C. went to court, asserting that their community’s inheritance laws violated Tanzania’s constitution and human rights obligations. One court recognized the discrimination, but rejected their claims. The appeals court took four years to hear the case, and then dismissed it on a technicality. With no hope of justice in these courts, the widows turned to the United Nations.
Last April, in its landmark decision, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (the CEDAW Committee) found that Tanzania’s codified customary law violated the women’s rights by denying them equality in respect of inheritance. It also found that Tanzania’s courts had violated their rights of access to justice and to an effective remedy. It recommended that the Tanzanian government compensate both widows, and called for constitutional and customary law reforms and practical measures to eliminate this discrimination.
However, a year later, the widows are still waiting.
Svetlana Medvedeva cannot rise to the top of her chosen profession for a very simple reason – she is a woman.
The ambition of the 30-year-old mother of two is to earn a much better wage as the captain of a boat on the Volga River, which runs through her hometown of Samara. And with the degree she earned in 2005 from Samara River College, she should be well on her way — or already there.
But with the system in place on the Volga, the occupation of captain requires her to have prior experience as a ship mechanic. And that job is one of hundreds that are open to men only in Russia, according to the law.
A Russian government resolution passed in 2000 prohibits women from 38 industries and over 450 jobs it deems to be “dangerous” or “arduous.”
Adopted during President Vladimir Putin’s first year in office, it was the latest incarnation of Soviet-era regulations that sought to keep women in what the Communist Party once called their “traditional” role of bearing children for the greater good of society.
Hindu religious leader Shankaracharya Swami Swaroopanand Saraswati has ignited an outcry in India after saying that entry of women in Shani temple in Maharashtra state will lead to more crimes such as rapes.
Commenting on the recent entry of women in a temple in western Maharashtra state, Shankaracharya, 94, said on Sunday that “women should not feel triumphant about visiting the sanctum sanctorum of Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra.
“They should stop all the drum beating about what they have done. Worshipping Shani will bring ill luck to them and give rise to crimes against them like rape,” he was quoted as saying by the Indian Express newspaper on Sunday.
Women’s groups and activists decried the comment, describing the statement as patriarchal and against the dignity of women.
“Society is not going to tolerate this. Women will struggle against such mindset,” Jagmati Sangwan, General Secretary of All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), told Al Jazeera by phone on Monday.
Last week, Maharashtra High Court struck down a 400-year-old ban on entry of women in Shani Shingnapur temple on the ground that women cannot be discriminated on basis of their gender.
1. The Church defines the ideal relationship as a heterosexual marriage. But Francis writes that other loving relationships can have value too.
“Christian marriage, as a reflection of the union between Christ and his Church, is fully realized in the union between a man and a woman who give themselves to each other in a free, faithful and exclusive love, who belong to each other until death and are open to the transmission of life, and are consecrated by the sacrament, which grants them the grace to become a domestic church and a leaven of new life for society. Some forms of union radically contradict this ideal, while others realize it in at least a partial and analogous way. The Synod Fathers stated that the Church does not disregard the constructive elements in those situations which do not yet or no longer correspond to her teaching on marriage.”
2. That being said, Francis makes it totally clear in this document that he won’t support gay marriage.
“During the Synod, we discussed the situation of families whose members include persons who experience same-sex attraction, a situation not easy either for parents or for children. We would like before all else to reaffirm that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration, while ‘every sign of unjust discrimination’ is to be carefully avoided, particularly any form of aggression and violence…. In discussing the dignity and mission of the family, the Synod Fathers observed that, ‘as for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.’”
