The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has expressed outrage over a 34-year prison sentence handed down to a Saudi woman charged with following and retweeting so-called dissidents and activists.
The Ph.D. student; Salma Al-Shehab was sentenced to 34 years in jail, followed by a 34-year travel ban in connection with a series of tweets and retweets on political and human rights issues in Saudi Arabia.
“We urge the Saudi authorities to quash her conviction and release her immediately and unconditionally.
“She should never have been arrested and charged in the first place for such conduct,” OHCHR spokesperson Liz Throssell said in a statement.
According to the statement, the extraordinarily lengthy sentence adds to “the chilling effect” among Government critics and civil society at large.
It described it as yet another example of Saudi authorities weaponizing the country’s counter-terrorism and anti-cybercrime laws to target.
Her sentence is believed to be the longest ever imposed on a Saudi woman for her peaceful online expression.
The authorities detained al-Shehab in January 2021 while she was visiting Saudi Arabia and a few days before her planned return to the United Kingdom, where she was a Ph.D. candidate in her final year at the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds studying new techniques in oral and dental medicine. Al-Shehab has two children, ages 6 and 4.
The appeals court did not clarify which tweets prompted al-Shehab’s arrest.
Meanwhile, a review by Human Rights Watch on al-Shehab’s current Twitter account, revealed that most tweets over the past four years related to her family and women’s rights issues in Saudi Arabia, none of which advocated or endorsed violence.
We hope she gets out of prison soon.
