RIYADH — The National Society for Human Rights (NSHR), Saudi Arabia’s non-governmental rights body, will address the Governorate of Riyadh regarding Yara, a 36-year-old Jeddah-based businesswoman who was apprehended by the religious police and thrown in Al-Malaz Prison on Monday.
Yara said she endured a humiliating and frightening hours-long ordeal that began with her arrest by a member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice for having coffee with an unrelated man in a Starbucks cafe in Riyadh.
“We have visited Yara at home and took her official complaint,” NSHR member Al-Jawhara Al-Angari told Arab News yesterday. “The complaint will be sent to the main office in Riyadh where further notices from our part will be added. It will then be sent to the Governorate of Riyadh.”
Yara says she was forced to fingerprint two confessions and was strip-searched in the prison. She also said she was produced before a “legal sheikh” who sat behind a one-way glass window and told her she would go to hell for the moral crimes she had committed.
The incident occurred on the same day that Yakin Ertürk, the special rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on Violence Against Women, arrived in the Kingdom on a 10-day visit.
A member of the religious police apprehended Yara for the moral crime of “khulwa” (a state of seclusion with an unrelated man). The woman’s colleague, a Syrian financial analyst, was also arrested and released the following day.
According to Al-Angari, several serious violations of human rights were apparent in this case. “First of all, Yara was not in a state of khulwa,” said Al-Angari. “She was in a public place where people were all around them,” said Al-Angari.
Yara told the NSHR that the commission member who arrested her was not accompanied by a police officer and that he didn’t provide any documentation, or even his name. He also prevented her from contacting relatives.
“She had relatives in Riyadh at the time whom she could have contacted,” said Al-Angari. “A relative should have come to be with her when she was being taken somewhere.”
After the commission member forced Yara to go with him in a taxi, she said that she was placed in a GMC parked in front of a local commission center.
This, said Al-Angari, is a direct violation of an Interior Ministry order that commission members are not to hold suspects but rather turn them over to proper authorities for investigation.
“The confiscation of her mobile and the refusal of the commission member to allow her to contact her husband or any other relative to come to her rescue was another violation,” Al-Angari said.
Another human rights violation was forcing Yara to fingerprint a confession under duress.
Having grown up in the US, Yara’s Arabic language skills are insufficient to have been able to comprehend what was written on the document she was compelled to sign.
“She cannot read Arabic,” Al-Angari said. “The commission member should have read to her what she was going to fingerprint. She had no idea what she was fingerprinting. She obliged in a state of panic.”
The NSHR official described the manner in which Yara was strip-searched in prison as “inhuman”.
“It was degrading to her, both mentally and physically. The fact that she was asked to remove her clothes like that implied she was a criminal,” she said.
The NSHR member said the rights body would urge the Governorate of Riyadh to drop all fingerprinted confession papers from Yara’s public file.
“We also will take note of the violations that had occurred in this case and notify the governorate about them. We further will ask that Yara be compensated for the damages she sustained,” she said. However, Yara’s case is not the first of its reported kind in the Kingdom. In 2003, the religious police apprehended a British woman in the capital from the Kingdom Center on the charge of “not covering up sufficiently” in public. The woman was forced to get into a taxi by a commission member. She was taken to one of their centers.
She later narrated to Arab News how three men grabbed her from behind and forced her to fingerprint a document in Arabic. She was then thrown in Al-Malaz Prison in a similar manner. Even though she was released at the intervention of the embassy, the woman suffered from serious psychological repercussions. Her husband told Arab News at that time that she refused to take off her abaya (the body veil) inside their house for three weeks after the incident. The couple eventually left the Kingdom.
