RIYADH — A week after a Jeddah-based businesswoman was detained in an hours-long ordeal for the “moral crime” of being in a state of seclusion (khulwa) in a public place with an unrelated man in Riyadh, the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) has sought an explanation from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
“The letter was sent on Monday,” said NSHR Vice President Mufleh Al-Qahtani. “We, at NSHR, follow a certain procedure in trying to get to the bottom of the whole story.”
Yara was arrested, along with a Syrian colleague, for being together in a Starbucks cafe in Riyadh. The 36-year-old woman said she was forced to fingerprint two confessions and was strip-searched at Riyadh’s Malaz Prison.
According to Yara, the commission member ordered her into a taxi by calling himself “the government”. In the taxi, Yara says the commission member took away her mobile phone. For hours, Yara claims, she was prevented from contacting her husband.
The NSHR says that it has asked the commission about what it has identified as several human rights violations. Notably, the NSHR wants to know why the commission member had no police escort at the time of Yara’s arrest; why the commission member had no identity badge; how the commission member compelled the woman into a taxi; why Yara was forced to fingerprint the confession; and why the commission did not — in accordance with an Interior Ministry notification issued last year — turn the suspect over to proper police officers.
Al-Qahtani said that if the NSHR determines that the commission member violated the woman’s human rights, the group would then recommend that officials punish the member and ensure that such violations were not repeated.
The human rights official said that Yara’s complaint was not the only one it had received from citizens or residents in the Kingdom.
“We’ve received several complaints from nationals and foreign residents regarding the commission after the publication of our report on human rights in Saudi Arabia,” he told Arab News.
He said that in some of the cases it was proved that the commission members had violated the law. The matter was brought to the attention of higher authorities, he added.
Under the law — and according to directives from the Interior Ministry last year — all commission members must produce any suspect at a local police station. Under no condition is he or she to be taken to a commission center.
Yara claims that the commission member responsible for her ordeal took her in a taxi to a local commission center. She was then moved to one of the commission’s GMC Suburbans where, Yara says, she sat for a while before a man came out of the center with sheets of paper for her to fingerprint.
The case has received wide local and international coverage. Several Saudi columnists have commented on Yara’s case. Some of them have asked the commission members to be held accountable for their actions. Writing in Al-Bilad newspaper under the title “When Will the Commission be Held Accountable?” Yaqoob Ishaq said: “What this case demonstrates is that commission members are not accountable for their mistakes.”
Another Saudi columnist Abdullah Al-Alami called for justice to be served in the case. Writing in Al-Watan under the title “Who Abducted Yara?” he said: “The abduction of Yara is a clear violation of the Interior Ministry’s regulations and also the violation of her human rights.”
