Saudi women appeal for legal freedoms

wes

Saudi women appeal for legal freedoms

By Daniel Howden and Rachel Shields
Monday, 21 April 2008

In Riyadh, the college day begins for female students behind a locked door that will remain that way until male guardians come to collect them. Later, in a female-run business, everyone must vacate the premises so a delivery man can drop off a package. In Jeddah, a 40-year-old divorced woman cannot board a plane without the written permission of her 23-year-old son. Elsewhere, a female doctor cannot leave the house at all as her male driver fails to turn up for work. These scenes make up the daily reality for half of the Saudi Kingdom, the only country where women legally belong to men.

After more than a decade of lobbying, the New York-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has finally been granted access to Saudi Arabia, where it has uncovered a disturbing picture of women forced to live as children, denied basic rights and confined to a suffocating dependency on men.

Wajeha al-Huwaider, a critic of Saudi's guardian laws that force women to seek male permission for almost all aspects of their lives, is one of a growing number demanding change. "Sometimes I feel like I can't do anything; I am utterly reliant on other people, completely dependent. If you are dependent on another person, you've got nothing. That is how the men like it. They don't want us to be equals."

The House of Saud, in alliance with an extremist religious establishment which enforces the most restrictive interpretation of sharia, Islamic law, has created a legal system that treats women as minors unable to exercise authority over even trivial daily matters.

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Related article from the Guardians Comment is Free:

Our dirty little secret

The Guardian article is mostly good, but to call what is going on in Saudi a secret of any kind is a joke. Everyone knows what going, so its hardly a secret. With that exception, its still a great article.

While, I understand that we (in the "West") can't quite do without oil, so that kind of boycott would be a non-starter.

However, a cultural and sports boycott could at least let the Saudi regime know, what we think of there system of gender apartheid. It may not initially do much, but it could perhaps wear them down over time.