There's so much going on elsewhere that we forget about Saudi Arabia. Isn't it slowly liberalising, or something? Well no....no it isn't:
Saudi Arabia has handed down its harshest ever sentence to a women’s rights activist, sentencing her to 45 years in prison for opposing the regime on social media.
Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani was convicted in the Specialised Criminal Court for “using the internet to tear the social fabric” and “violating the public order by using social media”, according to a court document received by rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn).
Little is known about Qahtani or the accusations but it comes a fortnight after Salma al-Shehab, a University of Leeds doctoral student, was sent to prison for 34 years in what was believed to be the harshest such sentence in the kingdom.
Reports of the sentence also emerged on the same day a video was released on social media showing security forces beating women, shocking them with tasers and dragging them by their hair during a reported hunger strike over poor conditions at an orphanage in Khamis Mushai, in the southwest of the country....
Last year US intelligence agencies concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the operation that led to the murder and dismemberment of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. President Biden promised to make the kingdom a “pariah state” but apparently reversed that policy by visiting the crown prince in July, giving him a fist bump.
We need the oil.
Abdullah Alaoudh, Dawn’s director of research for the Gulf, said Qahtani’s sentence showed “how emboldened Saudi authorities feel to punish even the mildest criticism from its citizens”.
Shehab’s conviction included retweeting and following Saudi dissidents and human rights activists on Twitter.
This year Riyadh carried out a mass execution of 81 prisoners — many of them rights activists — for what it described as terror-related offences, despite promises to curtail its use of the death penalty....
Alaoudh said: “In both the al-Shebab and al-Qahtani cases, Saudi authorities have used abusive laws to target and punish Saudi citizens for criticising the government on Twitter, but this is only half the story because even the crown prince would not allow such vindictive and excessive sentences if he felt that these actions would be met by meaningful censor by the United States and other western governments. Clearly, they are not.”