Saudi Woman Who Spent 6 Months In Jail For Disobeying Her Father Released

If it wasn't for the Internet a Saudi Arabian woman would still be rotting in jail for allegedly 'disobeying her father'. Yes, this actually happened not to some rebellious teenager but to a 32-year-old divorced woman. For more than six months Samar Badawi sat in jail for no justifiable reason. Apparently, she ran away to live in a women's shelter because of her abusive father. And because of the draconian, uncivilized male guardianship laws of Saudi Arabia, where a woman is tied to male relatives like an umbilical cord by the Kingdom's bizarre Sharia law, the Jeddah judge in the case threw her in jail on April 4th for disobeying her father.

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Even the governor of Mecca, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, tried to intervene on her behalf three months ago, demanding she be released to her uncles custody, but the courts refused to budge.

The most egregious aspect of the whole incident is the fact that Badawi was not formally charged with any 'crime' and there was no formal trial.

She was finally released after a 12-day major media and Internet blitz, with rights activists from within Saudi Arabia and out going to bat for Badawi. According to her lawyer, Waleed Abu Alkhair, they went to King Abdullah for help, and obviously it worked.

"The release came after judges saw the 12-day campaign, which made a lot of people pay attention to the case," Alkhair said.

"She told me, 'if you didn't write about me in the newspapers and internet, I would still be in jail,'" he said.

The guardian system, though some individuals seem to think protects the woman, is nothing more than a means of controlling her. Like a child, the woman needs permission to do everything- including marriage, work and travel. And not only does she need to seek permission from a father or husband, she must also ask a son or any other male relative.

The problem the divorced mother Badawi faced, is the fact it's a patriarchal cultural and religious society, where the judges and clerics are males and they have what seems to be unlimited power to do whatever they see fit, and we all know it certainly is not going to favour females.

Apparently, Badawi has had to deal with her abusive father since childhood and had tried to switch guardianship from her dad to her uncle after he refused to allow her to remarry.

Thank God for the Internet and for human rights activists who work tirelessly to help those whose rights are violated. And thanks to them, they are seeking an investigation into those judges who jailed her without a formal trial. Hopefully justice will be served since this poor woman should never have been jailed to begin with.