The sentence pronounced against Salma al-Chehab is the longest ever inflicted on a defendant of women’s rights in the Wahhabite kingdom.
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On her personal Twitter social network page, she had pinned her messages at the top of her messages to “freedom to prisoners of conscience and to each oppressed person in the world”. On August 9, Salma al-Chehab, a 34-year-old medical doctoral student, was sentenced to thirty-four years in prison, followed by a ban on the exit from Saudi territory of the same duration. His crime: having written or shared messages of support for women in the kingdom, led by an iron fist by Prince Mohammed Ben Salman.
This pain, surrealist, is the longest ever inflicted on a defendant of women in Saudi Arabia. And, once again, this conviction was preceded by arbitrary detention and ill-treatment.
In January 2021, this mother of two young children, registered at the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom, had been arrested during her vacation in Saudi Arabia. During interrogations, Salma al-Chehab was criticized for support for Loujain al-Hathoull, an activist known for her fight in favor of the right of women to lead to the kingdom, who spent almost three years in jail. Or to have watched videos of the blogger and dissident Omar Abdulaziz, a relative of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in October 2018 in the enclosure of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul by a Saudi commando.
Abuse, threats and sectarian harassment
Salma al-Chehab had been sentenced, in June 2022, to six years in prison at first instance for support for terrorism and disturbing public order. Accusations that she rejected vigorously: “Your honor, I wrote this dissertation to explain the injustice I have been the victim. I hope God will assist you and help you assume the responsibility to do justice And to protect the weakness of injustice, “she wrote to the Court, shortly before this first condemnation.
In this document, transmitted to the world by The Freedom Initiative, an organization based in the United States which defends opinion prisoners in the Middle East and North Africa, Salma al-Chehab claims to have been the victim of abuse , threats and sectarian harassment during his detention and during interrogations, evoking a “submission to inhuman torture and treatments”.
The academic, who did not have access to a lawyer after his arrest, was maintained in isolation for thirteen days, “under the direction of an investigator who [l] ‘deprived of the first Visit of [s] a family – 70
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