He therefore found himself judges in Saudi Arabia to condemn, on August 9, to thirty-four years in prison, a doctoral student in dental medicine. For what crime? Having shared messages in favor of women’s rights on a Twitter account that has remained particularly confidential.
At first instance, in 2021, a very heavy sentence of six years in prison, three of whom were suspended, had already been pronounced against Salma al-Chehab, 34 years old, mother of two and who belongs to a minority Shiite often unjustly stigmatized. On appeal, Saudi justice has made this choice of the grotesque. A ban on leaving the kingdom for a similar period has even been added to make a good measure. This justice considered that the young woman, who continued her studies in the United Kingdom before her arrest during a visit to Saudi Arabia, “provided help to those who seek to disturb public order and to distribute false and malicious information “.
In matters of maliciousness with regard to the kingdom, judges behind this ubiquitous sentence have, in fact, broke all records. They justified the worst shots of which the Saudi authorities are the first to complain. With such civil servants, Saudi Arabia does not need detractors. For the record, the heaviest sentence pronounced against the members of the responsible commando, in 2018, of the assassination and the atrocious dismemberment of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, in the consulate of the kingdom in Istanbul, was fourteen years old than that which Salma al-chehab strike…
MBS accounting of this decision
As we will not insult the Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman, master of fact of the kingdom, to consider that his hands are linked by the principle of separation of powers, he is obviously accounting for this scandalous condemnation which has moved until to the United Nations. By ricochet, this sentence can only bother the Western leaders who participated in its recent rehabilitation after the Khashoggi affair. It is the President of the United States, Joe Biden, who met him in July in Djedda, and Emmanuel Macron, who received him later in Paris. Even the most freezing of realpolitiks should impose limits on arbitrariness, especially when we claim to defend values such as equity and respect for human rights.
We must hope that reason quickly returns to the Saudi authorities and that this sentence which ridicules them in the eyes of the whole world is quickly canceled. The opposite would testify to a disturbing deafness on the part of a prince whose ascent has been marked as much by a particularly brutal step of his peers, within a monarchy where power had long been exercised collegiate church, that by particularly hazardous decisions, such as the devastating and vain war delivered to Yemen against the Houthist rebellion.
Before the assassination of the Saudi dissident, which was followed by forty diplomatic, Mohammed Ben Salman had not counted his energy to install the story of a reformer prince, determined to draw the kingdom of immobility And to anticipate the end of the oil rent which today inflates the Saudi boxes. The strategic choice of a greater opening of the kingdom on the world, in particular by tourism, is however incompatible with the customs and customs of satrap that illustrates the unreed condemnation of Salma al-Chehab.