Last week on “The 8 O’Clock” television show hosted by Dawood Al-Shraiyn, guests included several Saudi women having problems with the Social Affairs Ministry and the Civil Bureau. The program brought to light inadequacies in the way Saudi society handles women’s rights, but it also fell far short on discussing ways to solve those issues.
The women who appeared on the program told their stories of dealing with divorce and the Saudi domestic judicial system. One woman said her father and mother divorced, and as a way to punish her mother, her father refused to add any of his daughters to his family national identification card. The mother had since died, but the daughters have been deprived of their basic rights to health care and other services entitled to any Saudi because they lacked the identification card. The father continued to refuse to place them on the card.
This woman and her sisters went to then-Interior Minister Prince Naif, who responded by awarding them SR30,000 to help them cope with life. However, once Prince Naif died, no one attended to their cause and the women were left in poverty.
Another woman on the program said she hadn’t seen her child in 12 years after her ex-husband kidnapped the boy.
We know now that divorced women can obtain an original copy of her husband’s family identification card so she can secure an education and health care for her children. But that hasn’t always been the case, and even today it is not easy to obtain such documentation because the domestic courts are skewed in favor of husbands and fathers. Even today, only a father can register a newborn baby.
These two cases illustrate the haphazard way Saudis go about rectifying obvious wrongs. In many cases, we resort to tribal methods. We are extremely fortunate as a society that many of us have access to our royals. But realistically, not all of us have that kind of access.
But the program dropped the ball by failing to bring in high officials from the Social Affairs Ministry and the Civil Bureau to offer answers and solutions to the issues faced by the female guests. The National Society for Human Rights notified the program’s producers that it is willing to take on the guests’ issues follow up on the paperwork with the Civil Bureau, but it doesn’t solve the overriding concerns that all Saudis do not have equal access to agencies that can provide solutions.
The responsibility of the government is to introduce a system to help such women. By allowing fathers and husbands wide-ranging rights that negatively affect their wives and daughters, denies women their basic rights in Islam. Judges and government officials charged with the care of Saudi women deal with individual cases without implementation of Islamic law. Granting women the rights guaranteed in Islam would free them the mercy of unscrupulous men in a society that is like a bird that flies with one wing.
We are a nation that is still mired in a tribal society. The disenfranchised can no longer afford in the 21st century to have their cases heard on an individual basis. The rule of law must apply to everyone.
@saudiwriter
[email protected]
