Saudi woman faces flogging for driving, says Amnesty International

A Saudi court has sentenced a woman to 10 lashes for challenging a ban on women driving in the conservative Muslim kingdom, Amnesty International said on Tuesday.

The sentence was reported two days after Saudi King Abdullah granted women the right to vote and run in municipal elections. He also promised to include them in the next all-appointed consultative Shura Council in 2013.

	A Saudi Arabian woman driving a car as part of a campaign to defy Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on June 17, 2011.
	Photo by: AP

"Flogging is a cruel punishment in all circumstances but it beggars belief that the authorities in Saudi Arabia have imposed lashes on a woman apparently for merely driving a car", Philip
Luther, an Amnesty regional deputy director, said in an emailed statement.

"Allowing women to vote in council elections is all well and good, but if they are still going to face being flogged for trying to exercise their right to freedom of movement, then the king's much trumpeted 'reforms' actually amount to very little," Luther said.

Two other women are also believed to be facing charges related to driving, the Amnesty statement said.

Najla Hariri, one of the women facing charges, told Reuters: "They called me in for questioning on a charge of challenging the monarch on Sunday... I signed a pledge not to drive again, although my driving was a result of necessity not an act of defiance."

Under Saudi Arabia's strict Islamic laws, women require a male guardian's permission to work, travel abroad or undergo certain types of surgery.

There is no law banning women from driving, but there is a law requiring citizens to use locally issued licenses while in the country. Such licenses are not issued to women, making it effectively illegal for them to drive.

In May, as pro-democracy protests swept the region, some women in Saudi Arabia called for the right to drive. A campaign dubbed Women2Drive issued calls on social media such as Twitter and Facebook to challenge the ban.

Some women posted on Twitter that they drove successfully in the streets of Jeddah, Riyadh and Khobar while others said they were stopped by police who later let them go after signing a pledge not to drive again.

On May 22, Manal Alsharif, who posted a YouTube video of her driving in the streets of Khobar, was arrested. She was later released but her case proved a deterrent for many women.

"I am very upset and disturbed... I believe that this is a message which intends to tell women that they will not get all their demands," said Naila Attar, an activist and one of the women who organized the campaign Baladi (My Country), calling for Saudi women to have the right to vote.

"We are now working on a petition to the king ... asking him to stop the lashing order," she said.