RIYADH, 3 July 2006 — The Shoura Council approved a law yesterday to name violators of the Kingdom’s residency law, as well as citizens who illegally hire overstayers for work, in local newspapers. The decision was taken after hearing a recommendation presented by the Security Committee. Voting on the topic in the council took place after it had been postponed from an earlier session in order to gather more opinions. The new legislation passed with 92 voting for and 26 against.

The Security Committee had earlier submitted a report to council members urging them to take action on the issue of the increasing numbers of overstayers in the Kingdom, which according to the head of the committee, “could not be delayed any further.”

The committee based its report on statistics from the Ministry of Haj which said that in the past three years 213,000 overstayers — or nine percent of all Umrah pilgrims — failed to return to their home countries and were currently in the Kingdom illegally.

However, other statistics provided by experts within the council indicated that the number of overstayers in the Kingdom could be as high as 400,000 — 20.3 percent of those who came here to perform the ritual estimated at 1,970,000.

Several members who spoke yesterday against the new legislation in the council feared that identifying a violator would give his institution free advertisement in the press. Others feared that the step would be “harmful” and do “injustice” to the overstayers or citizens hiring them for work. Instead, they said it would be better to just enforce the current law set by the Royal Decree which was to fine the institution SR100,000 and jail the owner for two years. The illegal worker, current law says, should be jailed for a year and fined SR50,000.

Bakr Al-Khushaim, head of the Security Committee, defended the naming of violators and said “this would be the final resort after all other options of fining have been exhausted.” The new legislation allows the government to publish the names of offenders in a newspaper in the vicinity of the violators. If there was no newspaper in the vicinity, then the name would appear in a nearby paper.