JEDDAH, 26 March 2005 — A four-member committee has been set up to look into complaints lodged by individuals as well as officials of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice against the mass media.
Dr. Abdullah Al-Jasser, undersecretary for media affairs at the Ministry of Information, will chair the committee, Al-Madinah Arabic newspaper reported yesterday quoting informed sources.
The move came after the government decided to withdraw all cases related to the press from courts and transferred them to the Culture and Information Ministry in accordance with the new Press and Publications Law.
Crown Prince Abdullah last week quashed a Shariah court verdict against Hamza Al-Mizeini, a Saudi writer, in a libel case filed by Dr. Abdullah Al-Barak, who is a teacher at King Saud University in Riyadh.
Barak accused Mizeini of tarnishing his image and branding Islamic textbooks used at the university as radical.
Judge Suleiman Al-Fantookh sentenced Mizeini to 275 lashes and four-month jail. Al-Mizeini had also been told that he would be banned from writing in the Saudi media.
The timely intervention by Crown Prince Abdullah has been widely applauded by Saudi writers, thinkers and media persons.
The new committee includes representatives from the ministries of justice, interior, commerce and industry as well as legal consultants at the Information Ministry.
In light of the new government decision, the lawsuit filed by Sheikh Salman Al-Auda against Al-Watan Arabic daily for a report published on his son Muad (Lawyer Dr. Muhammad Al-Tuwaijeri filed the case on behalf of Auda) and another lawsuit by the commission against Abdullah Bakheet, a writer in Al-Jazirah daily, will be withdrawn from the courts.
