A student was sentenced to 34 years in prison in Saudi Arabia for maintaining a Twitter account and following and sharing posts by dissidents and activists.
According to the British newspaper The Guardian, Salma al-Shehab was detained in her home country days before returning to Europe after a period of vacation; she is a PhD student at the University of Leeds, UK.
The Saudi, who is 34 years old and is a mother of two young children, was initially sentenced to six years in prison. But an appeal filed by a prosecutor last week, citing other charges, led to a new sentence — 34 years in jail, followed by a travel ban for the next 34 years.
According to the Washington-based nonprofit Freedom Initiative, this is the longest sentence given to a women’s rights activist in Riyadh.
Shehab was not known as an activist, either in Saudi Arabia or in Europe. Her Twitter account, opened in 2010, mixes photographs of her young children and posts from exiled Saudi dissidents calling for the release of the country’s prisoners.
According to the Guardian, which had access to trial transcripts, the new charges included alleging that Shehab was aiding individuals who “seek to create turmoil and destabilize civil and national security” by following his Twitter accounts and sharing them.
The British newspaper says the student still has a chance to file a new appeal.
The sentence, issued by a special terrorism court, comes shortly after a series of meetings between Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Western officials. Last month, he was received in Paris by French President Emmanuel Macron and was visited by US President Joe Biden in the Middle East. Months earlier, Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, also went to Riyadh.
Known by the acronym MbS, the crown prince and leader in practice in the country tries to break the isolation imposed on him after accusations of disrespect for human rights and of being the mastermind of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Helping this move is the fact that Western powers are looking for the successor to the throne of Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, amid the Ukrainian War and rising energy prices.
Human rights activists have warned that such visits could encourage the monarchy to escalate its crackdown on dissidents and other pro-democracy activists. In a recent editorial, The Washington Post echoed the warning, writing that the approximations “offer yet another glimpse of the brutal side of the Saudi dictatorship under the prince and de facto ruler”, who would present himself as a modernizer only in facade.
