A Saudi woman has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting the critics of the kingdom, marking the longest sentence ever given to a women’s rights defender in Saudi Arabia.
Faraan: Salma al-Shehab, 34, a mother of two young children and a student at Leeds University, was detained in Saudi Arabia in January 2021 when she was visiting home for a vacation. She was initially sentenced to six years in prison for using social media to “disturb public order and destabilize the security and stability of the state.”
However, an appeals court on Monday handed down a 34-year prison sentence followed by a 34-year travel ban, after a public prosecutor asked the court to consider other alleged crimes. She is now charged with “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilize civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts” and by retweeting their tweets, The Guardian reported, citing a translation of the court records.
The Monday ruling marks the latest example of a major crackdown on Twitter users led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). It comes a week after a federal court in the United States found Ahmad Abouammo, a former manager at Twitter, guilty of spying for Saudi Arabia’s royal family. Abouammo received at least 300,000 dollars and a 20,000-dollar luxury watch from Bader al-Asaker — a close adviser to MBS — to use his insider access to dig up information about Saudi dissidents active on Twitter, according to prosecutors.
He then attempted to conceal the payment by having the money deposited to a relative’s account in Lebanon first and wired to his US account later. Saudi Arabian authorities are reportedly investing hugely in Israeli companies that specialize in cyber espionage tools in order to track down political opponents. And tap their conversations. The sentencing also comes a month after US President Joe Biden paid a controversial visit to Saudi Arabia and fist-bumped the Saudi crown prince despite his earlier promise to make the Saudis the “pariah that they are” over human rights abuses, in particular the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the direct orders of the crown prince, also known as MBS.
At the time, Biden dismissed warnings by human rights activists that his trip would “embolden” MBS to continue his human rights violations and targeting of critics. The White House said in a statement at the time that Biden had raised the Khashoggi case in his meeting with the Saudi crown prince and “received commitments with respect to reforms and institutional safeguards in place to guard against any such conduct in the future.”
In an editorial on Tuesday, The Washington Post said Shehab’s case showed that the commitments Biden had received on reforms and institutional safeguards were “a farce.”
