RIYADH: A group of Saudi students who won a court ruling in December 2006 against Imam Muhammad ibn Saud University for falsely claiming accredited English-language courses have yet to see one halala of their court settlement. Now the group of 110 Saudi students is petitioning the National Society for Human Rights to get the university to cough up the SR25,000 per student order from the Court of Grievances.
"We brought our case to the NSHR after losing hope of getting back our money from the university," said one of the students, Sattam Saleh Al-Awad. "The court has ruled in our favor but no one has enforced the decision."
The Court of Grievances in Riyadh ruled that a two-year English teaching program that was advertised as accredited by the Civil Service Ministry and the Ministry of Education in fact was unrecognized and worthless.
Universities do not recognize courses that are not accredited, so students that have taken unaccredited courses must retake the same courses at an accredited institution if they want to continue their education elsewhere.
The new complaint will be forwarded to the head of the human rights body who will send a letter to the university asking for the reasons why it is reluctant to act according to the court's decision.
"We have been promised by Sulaiman Abalkhail, the rector of Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University, that we would be paid back our tuition according to the court order before the end of 2007," said Al-Awad, speaking on behalf of the students. "We visited the rector of the university at his office in Riyadh ... We were told that the reimbursement would only be made if the 2008 budget has an allocation for compensations."
Abalkhail has reportedly not specified a date when the money would be paid out and said he had no idea when the Ministry of Finance would allocate the funds.
"We have sent a letter to the Ministry of Higher Education, which bureaucratically sends another letter to Ministry of Finance," Abalkhail told the visiting graduates.
Feeling despondent, the students told Arab News: "After meeting with the university rector, we have come to the conclusion that we will never get our money."
The two-year program, which is no longer available at the university, was run by Al-Faisal Academy on the university's premises in four provinces of the Kingdom: Qassim, Riyadh, Madinah and the Eastern Province.
The university's reluctance to obey the court order led the students to file a complaint to the Ministry of Interior to enforce the court decision. The complaint ended up at the Ministry of Higher Education.
"We are in the right direction toward finding a solution to this problem," Abalkhail told Al-Ekhbariah news channel in a program aired last August.
"We are working positively on finding a solution for the 110 students who obtained the court order," he said, adding that the rest of the graduates would have to follow regulatory procedures. Two of the graduates, Nayef Al-Furaidy and Al-Awad, were also invited to the Al-Ekhbariah program.
Abalkhail confessed on TV that the graduates' case was valid and pointed a finger at "other parties" involved. "There are some missing links in this case which are not implicated and I do not want to name them," he said.
Speaking to Arab News on Aug. 25 last year, Abalkhail said, "It is a matter of time ... the 110 students will be paid back as soon as possible."
However, the students have lost the hope of being reimbursed and there have approached the NSHR.
"The solution, which was once very close, has now evaporated. It is just a matter of principle that we are advocating here. We just want to hold those who have made this grave mistake accountable so that they don't do it again," Al-Awad told Arab News last November.
