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Saudi Arabia - Status of Women

Mohammed bin Salman brought breakthrough changes to the Kingdom’s guardianship laws on 02 August 2019. According to the law’s amendments, Saudi women above 21 will be allowed to apply for passports and travel freely without the permission of a male guardian. Other changes issued in the decrees allow women to register a marriage, divorce, or child’s birth and to be issued official family documents. It also stipulates that a father or mother can be legal guardians of children. For women, being able to obtain family documents could facilitate the process of obtaining a national identity card and enrolling their children in school.

Princess Reema bint Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the US and the first Saudi female ambassador, said that the new developments for women were “history in the making.” The ambassador said “I am elated to confirm that Saudi Arabia will be enacting amendments to its labor and civil laws that are designed to elevate the status of Saudi women within our society, including granting them the right to apply for passports and travel independently ... These developments have been a long time coming. From the inclusion of women in the consultative council to issuing driving licenses to women, our leadership has proved its unequivocal commitment to gender equality ... They call for the equal engagement of women and men in our society. It is a holistic approach to gender equality that will unquestionably create real change for Saudi women,” she said, adding that women “have always played an integral role in our country’s development, and they will continue to do so moving forward on equal footing with their male counterparts.”

The Kingdom had operated under a strict guardianship program for women, which means they have to seek permission from a male relative for a wide range of activities, from travel to study. The reforms to give women more rights are said to be part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 economic plan to modernize the conservative monarchy and make it more attractive to foreign investors. The Council of Senior Scholars are appointed and paid by the government. King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud announced in 2017 that women would be allowed to drive for the first time, starting in June 2018. Riyadh also said it would lift a ban on cinemas, and women were allowed attend a limited number of football stadiums in January 2018.

A Saudi cleric said 10 February 2018 women should not be forced to wear the long cloak required by law in the conservative Gulf kingdom. The abaya is a full length robe which women in Saudi Arabia are required to wear along with a headscarf when they are in public. Sheikh Abdullah al-Mutlaq, a member of the Kingdom’s religious body, the Council of Senior Scholars, made the comment on his radio program. It was a marked departure from the Kingdom’s strict dress code rules. "More than 90 percent of pious Muslim women in the Muslim world do not wear abayas," Sheikh Mutlaq said. "So we should not force people to wear abayas."

Although in recent years some Saudi women have started to wear colored abayas rather than the standard black, the dress code remains strict and is enforced by morality police. In 2016, a woman was arrested for taking her abaya off, and in July, video footage of a woman wearing a mini skirt in Ushaiger sparked outrage and resulted in her arrest. She was released without charge following international attention. It isn’t just the women who are subjected to strict dress codes. Men must dress modestly, with their legs and shoulders covered. In 2016, 50 men were arrested for having “un-Islamic” haircuts and accessories. This came after the Kingdom stripped the morality police of their abilities to arrest people.

Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on women drivers whenthe country’s leader, King Salman, ordered the change in a decree September 27, 2017. State media said the decree ordered the creation of a group of ministers. They are to offer advice on steps for giving women legal permission to drive. The order is expected to be carried out by June 2018, reports said.

Saudi Arabia was the only country that refused to issue driver’s licenses to women. Those who attempted to drive were detained. As recently as 2014, two Saudi women were detained for more than two months for breaking the rule. Women’s rights activists have been pushing for the right to drive since the 1990s.

Prince Khaled bin Salman is the king’s son and the Saudi ambassador to the United States. He told reporters in Washington the decision marks a “huge step forward” and that “society is ready” for the change.

In Saudi Arabia, women are legally required to get approval from a male guardian for legal decisions. These can include education, employment, marriage, travel and medical treatment.But the prince said women will not need approval from their guardians to get a driver’s license and will be able to drive alone in the car. They will have permission to drive anywhere in the kingdom, including the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Women continued to face significant discrimination under law and custom, and many remained uninformed about their rights. The law does not provide for the same legal status and rights for women as for men, and since there is no codified personal-status law, judges made decisions regarding family matters based on their interpretations of Islamic law. Although they may legally own property and are entitled to financial support from their guardian, women have fewer political or social rights than men, and society treated them as unequal members in the political and social spheres.

The guardianship system requires that every woman have a close male relative as her “guardian” with the legal authority to approve her travel outside of the country. A guardian also has authority to approve some types of business licenses and study at a university or college. Women can make their own determinations concerning hospital care. Women can work without their guardian’s permission, but most employers required women to have such permission. A husband who verbally (rather than through a court process) divorces his wife or refuses to sign final divorce papers continues to be her legal guardian.

The overall percentage of female workforce participation was 21 percent, according to the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report 2015. The law does not require equal pay for equal work.

Nationality law discriminates against women, who cannot directly transmit citizenship to their children. The country’s interpretation of sharia prohibits women from marrying non-Muslims, but men may marry Christians and Jews. Women require government permission to marry noncitizens; men must be more than 25 years old to marry a foreigner and must obtain government permission if they intend to marry citizens from countries other than Gulf Cooperation Council member states (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE). Regulations prohibit men from marrying women from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Chad, and Burma. The government additionally required Saudi men wishing to marry a second wife who is a foreigner to submit documentation attesting to the fact that his first wife is either disabled, suffering from a chronic disease, or sterile.

Widespread societal exclusion enforced by, but not limited to, state institutions restricted women from using many public facilities. The law requires women usually to sit in separate, specially designated family sections. They frequently cannot consume food in restaurants that do not have such sections. Women risk arrest for riding in a private vehicle driven by a male who is not an employee (such as a hired chauffeur or taxi driver) or a close male relative. Cultural norms enforced by state institutions require women to wear an abaya (a loose-fitting, full-length black cloak) in public. The CPVPV also generally expected Muslim women to cover their hair and non-Muslim women from Asian and African countries to comply more fully with local customs of dress than non-Muslim Western women.

Women also face discrimination in courts, where the testimony of one man equals that of two women. All judges are male, and women faced restrictions on their practice of law. In divorce proceedings, women must demonstrate legally specified grounds for divorce, but men can divorce without giving cause. In doing so, men must pay immediately an amount of money agreed at the time of the marriage that serves as a one-time alimony payment. Men can be forced, however, to make subsequent alimony payments by court order. The government began implementing an identification system based on fingerprints that was designed to provide women more reliable access to courts. The previous system required women to present themselves at court in the presence of a male relative to prove their identity if they declined to unveil their faces.

Women face discrimination under family law. For example, a woman needs a guardian’s permission to marry or must seek a court order in the case of adhl (male guardians refusing to approve the marriage of women under their charge). In such adhl cases, the judge assumes the role of the guardian and can approve the marriage. On October 18, the Ministry of Justice reported that courts received 755 cases of adhl during the previous year.

Courts award custody of children when they attain a specified age (seven years for boys and nine years for girls) to the divorced husband or the deceased husband’s family. In numerous cases, former husbands prevented divorced noncitizen women from visiting their children. Inheritance laws also discriminate against women, since daughters receive half the inheritance awarded to their brothers.

According to recent surveys, women constituted more than half of university students, although segregated education through university level was the norm. The only exceptions to segregation in higher education were medical schools at the undergraduate level and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, a graduate-level research university, where women worked jointly with men, were not required to wear a veil, and drove cars on campus. Other universities, such as al-Faisal University in Riyadh, offered partially segregated classes with students receiving instruction from the same teacher and able to participate together in class discussion, but with the women and men physically separated by dividers.

Authorities respected the right of citizens to change residence or workplace, provided they held a national identification card (NIC). The law requires all male citizens who are 15 or older to possess a NIC. In 2012 the Ministry of Interior announced it would start issuing NICs to all female citizens at the age of 15, phasing in the requirement over a seven-year period. In 2013 the ministry stated it had issued only 1.5 million NICs since 2002 to women; the country’s female population was approximately 9.8 million. The government prohibited women from driving motor vehicles by refusing to issue them licenses.

Rape is a criminal offense under sharia with a wide range of penalties from flogging to execution. The law does not recognize spousal rape as a crime. The government enforced the law based on its interpretation of sharia, and courts often punished victims as well as perpetrators for illegal “mixing of genders,” even when there was no conviction for rape. Victims also had to prove that the rape was committed, and women’s testimony in court is worth half the weight of that of a man. Consequently, due to these legal and social penalties, authorities brought few cases to trial.

The government did not maintain public records on prosecutions, convictions, or punishments. Statistics on incidents of rape were not available, but press reports and observers indicated rape was a serious problem. Moreover, most rape cases were likely unreported because victims faced societal and familial reprisal, including diminished marriage opportunities, criminal sanction up to imprisonment, or accusations of adultery or sexual relations outside of marriage, which are punishable under sharia.

The National Family Safety Program, a private charity organization founded in 2005 to spread awareness and combat domestic violence, including child abuse, continued to report abuse cases. In 2013 the Council of Ministers announced the adoption of a law against domestic violence that defines domestic abuse broadly and provides a framework for the government to prevent and protect victims of violence in the home. The law criminalizes domestic abuse with penalties of one month to one year of imprisonment or a fine of 5,000 to 50,000 riyals ($1,330 to $13,300) unless a court provides a harsher sentence.

Researchers stated domestic violence might be seriously under-reported, making it difficult to gauge the magnitude of the problem, which they believed to be widespread. Independent estimates supported by officials working at the Ministry of Social Affairs indicated the incidence of spousal abuse ranged widely, affecting 16 to 50 percent of all married women. Officials stated that the government did not clearly define domestic violence and procedures concerning cases, including thresholds for investigation or prosecution, and thus enforcement varied from one government body to another. Some women’s rights advocates were critical of investigations of domestic violence, claiming investigators were hesitant to enter the home without permission from the head of household, who may also be the male perpetrator. Some activists also claimed that authorities often did not investigate or prosecute cases involving domestic violence, instead encouraging victims and perpetrators to reconcile in order to keep families intact regardless of reported abuse.

The NSHR’s 2014 annual report noted that the organization investigated 312 cases of domestic violence and violations of women’s rights, compared with 360 such cases in 2013. Violence included a broad spectrum of abuse. There were reports of police or judges returning women directly to their abusers, most of whom were the women’s legal guardians. The government made efforts to combat domestic violence, and during the year the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue held workshops and distributed educational materials on peaceful conflict resolution between spouses and in families. The government supported family-protection shelters. The HRC received complaints of domestic abuse and referred them to other government offices. The HRC advised complainants and offered legal assistance to some female litigants. The organization provided services for children of female complainants and litigants and distributed publications supporting women’s rights in education, health care, development, and the workplace.

The extent of sexual harassment was difficult to measure, with little media reporting and no government data. The government’s interpretation of sharia guides courts on cases of sexual harassment. Nonetheless, female workers reported widespread sexual harassment and discrimination. Employers in many sectors maintained separate male and female workspaces where feasible, in accordance with law.

In early 2016 Saudi Arabian national television aired a video showing a family therapist teaching men how to beat their wives "correctly." In the tutorial, Khaled Al-Shaqby points out that men should not resort to violence as a first option, but should "discipline their wives first" before using violence. While admitting that some men use rods, sticks or sharp objects to beat their wives in order to discipline them, he advises against it. He suggests using a twig or a handkerchief to hit the wife, merely as a symbol to express their anger at the disobedience.

Al-Shaqby says he is "aware that this issue is a thorny one, which contains many hazards." But he adds: "Allah willing, we will cross this bridge safely."