Saudi Arabia sentences schoolgirl to 18 years in prison over tweets

ALQST rights group, which documents human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, has revealed that the Saudi Specialised Criminal Court handed out the sentence in August to 18-year-old Manal al-Gafiri, who was only 17 at the time of her arrest.

The Saudi judiciary, under the de facto rule of MbS, has issued several extreme prison sentences over cyber activism and the use of social media for criticising the government.

They include the recent death penalty against Mohammed al-Ghamdi, a retired teacher, for comments made on Twitter and YouTube, and the 34-year sentence of Leeds University doctoral candidate Salma al-Shehab over tweets last year.

The crown prince confirmed Ghamdi’s sentence during a wide-ranging interview with Fox News on Wednesday. He blamed it on “bad laws” that he cannot change.

“We are not happy with that. We are ashamed of that. But [under] the jury system, you have to follow the laws, and I cannot tell a judge [to] do that and ignore the law, because… that’s against the rule of law,” he said.

Saudi human rights defenders and lawyers, however, disputed bin Salman’s allegations and stated the crackdown on social media users is correlated with his ascent to power and the introduction of new judicial bodies that have since overseen a crackdown on his critics.

“He is able, with one word or the stroke of a pen, in seconds, to change the laws if he wants,” Taha al-Hajji, a Saudi lawyer and legal consultant with the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, told Middle East Eye.

According to Joey Shea, Saudi Arabia researcher at Human Rights Watch, Ghamdi was sentenced under a counterterrorism law passed in 2017, shortly after MbS became crown prince. The law has been criticised for its broad definition of terrorism.

Similarly, two new bodies – the Presidency of State Security and the Public Prosecution Office – were established by royal decrees in the same year.

Rights groups have said that the 2017 overhaul of the kingdom’s security apparatus has significantly enabled the repression of Saudi opposition voices, including those of women rights defenders and opposition activists.

“These violations are new under MbS, and it’s ridiculous that he is blaming this on the prosecution when he and senior Saudi authorities wield so much power over the prosecution services and the political apparatus more broadly,” Shea noted.