'Crumbs Of Freedom': Saudi Sisters Prove Limits Of Social Change

The Al-Otaibi sisters have paid a steep price for defending women's rights in Saudi Arabia, with one detained, another exiled, and the third trapped in the kingdom under a travel ban.

Initially, the Saudi sisters were emboldened by a social reform agenda which has led to dramatic changes in the deeply conservative Gulf country in the past seven years, including granting women the right to drive and the promotion of female sports.

But soon enough they came up against unspoken limits.

The youngest of the three sisters, Manahel, is a 29-year-old fitness instructor and blogger who has been languishing in detention since November 2022 for challenging Saudi male guardianship laws and requirements for women to wear the customary body-shrouding abaya robe.

She has not yet been convicted or sentenced, but public prosecutors have accused her of leading a "campaign to incite Saudi girls to denounce religious principles and rebel against the customs and traditions of Saudi society", according to court documents seen by AFP.

Her 32-year-old sister Foz, followed by 2.5 million people on social media app Snapchat, faces the same charges, albeit in absentia. She evaded arrest by fleeing to Scotland where she has since been granted political asylum.

"When Saudi Arabia decided to open up socially, it also decided to take revenge on all the activists who had previously been active in the field of women's rights," Foz told AFP over the phone.

The kingdom "wants to empower a specific group (of women) who are under their control and do not object to anything," she said.

Saudi authorities did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.

Since the 2017 appointment of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi women have benefited from an easing of social restrictions.

They have become ambassadors, bank directors, university administrators and even astronauts, while a World Bank report released in November found that the percentage of working-age women taking part in the workforce had more than doubled from 17.4 percent in early 2017 to 36 percent in early 2023.

The changes can also be felt in daily life, especially now that the religious police have been sidelined and rules requiring gender segregation in public and the wearing of abayas have been scrapped.

However, at least 122 women have been arrested since 2015, including 52 who remain detained, mostly for women's rights activism, according to the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights, a Berlin-based rights group.

They include Salma al-Shehab and Nourah al-Qahtani who were slapped with decades-long sentences in 2022 for online posts critical of the government.

"The cases of the Otaibi sisters reveal the reality behind the narrative of women's rights reforms in Saudi Arabia," said Lina al-Hathloul, head of monitoring and communication for the rights group ALQST.

"In the absence of any clear guidelines or transparency, women are left not knowing where the boundaries lie and what possible consequences their personal choices might have," she added.

"Such mixed messaging is a feature of Saudi women's rights reforms more broadly."

Manahel is awaiting trial before the Specialised Criminal Court (SCC) which was established in 2008 to handle terrorism-related cases but has been widely used to try political dissidents and human rights activists.

She irked authorities by posting photos of herself on Snapchat in a mall without the abaya and for social media posts calling for the removal of Saudi Arabia's repressive male guardianship laws.

Saudi authorities have prevented her from contacting the outside world, including her family, since November last year, according to Amnesty International.

"Manahel was content with the crumbs of freedom handed to her, but she was persecuted and imprisoned for...demanding more," her sister Foz said.

"We are not political dissidents, but the government has been very violent with us," she added, flagging the case of her eldest sister, Mariam.

Mariam, 36, used to work as a saleswoman, but was detained in 2017 for 104 days for her women's rights activism.

She is currently subjected to a travel ban and restrictions on her speech, according to Amnesty. Worse still, she is unable to land a job because of her criminal record, according to Foz.

"The authorities have destroyed us, separated us, and divided our family," Foz said.

"We are living in terror amid a family tragedy."