One of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent women’s rights activists was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison on Monday, despite international pressure to release her., according to a member of your family.
Loujain al-Hathloul’s sentence was suspended for two years and ten months, said his sister Lina al-Hathloul on twitter. Adding to the time she has spent in detention since her arrest in May 2018, she could be released in two months, according to her sister.
Lina Al-Hathloul tweeted that her sister was also subject to a five-year travel ban and that the prosecutor and Al-Hathloul could still appeal. NBC News was unable to independently verify all details of Al-Hathloul’s conviction.
A spokesman for the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Media confirmed that Al-Hathloul’s sentence was five years and eight months, two years and 10 months from which he was suspended, but he could not immediately confirm whether the sentence would be backdated to May 2018.
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Loujain Al-Hathloul, 31, gained prominence for openly calling for women to have the right to drive and for ending Saudi Arabia’s restrictive male guardianship system, which had long limited women’s freedom of movement. She was arrested along with several other activists in May 2018, just weeks before the kingdom ended a decades-old ban on driving women.
Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said that some of the women detained, including Al-Hathloul, reported having been abused while in prison, including electric shocks, lashes and sexual assault. Saudi Arabia has denied the charges.
Human Rights Watch said prosecutors accused Al-Hathloul in 2019 of crimes related to his defense of human rights, before amending his charge sheet and transferring his case in late November to the country’s notorious Specialized Criminal Court, which specializes in terrorism cases.
Other dissidents, including cleric Salman al-Awda, who appealed to the country’s rulers to be more sensitive to the population’s desire for reform, were also tried in the kingdom’s anti-terror court.
Al-Hathloul amended the charges to remain entirely related to his human rights work and include sharing information on Saudi women’s rights with country-based journalists, Saudi activists abroad, international bodies and human rights organizations, according to the Human Rights Watch.
Condemning Al-Hathloul between Christmas and New Year shows that Saudi Arabia wants to minimize the attention its condemnation receives, because they are embarrassed about how they treated it and how it should be, said Adam Coogle, deputy director of the Middle East division and North Africa on Human Rights Watch.
“This has always been a total farce and a caricature of justice,” he tweeted.
Since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman came to power in 2017, he has presented himself as a reformer eager to transform deeply conservative society. But he also presided over several crackdowns on dissidents, arresting intellectuals, clergy, women’s rights activists and members of the royal family.
Saudi Arabia has maintained welcoming relations with President Donald Trump’s administration, but is expected to have a cooler relationship with President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming team.
During his tenure, Trump praised the Saudi crackdown on hundreds of important businessmen, officials and members of the royal family at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh in November 2017. He also supported Saudi Arabia, even when the CIA concluded that the powerful Crown Prince ordered the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post, in Istanbul in October 2018.
Biden, on the other hand, promised to “reevaluate” the US relationship with the oil-rich kingdom, described Saudi Arabia as an “outcast” and said he believed Khashoggi was murdered by order of the Crown Prince.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
