A Saudi woman was sentenced to 30 years in prison

Business interested Reports say a woman in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for allegedly criticizing the NEOM project on Twitter. According to the human rights organization ALQST, the woman is Fatima Al-Shawarbi. She is said to be in her mid-twenties and from Al-Ahsa Governorate.

Huge versus human rights

NEOM is a huge future project planned by the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and is currently under construction. It covers an area of ​​26,500 square kilometers in the northwest of the country, near the Gulf of Aqaba and along the Red Sea coast. It mainly consists of four separate construction projects: the 170 km strip city “The Line”, the seaport and industrial site “Oxagon” as well as the holiday resorts “Sandala” in the sea and “Troy” in the mountains.

To date, NEOM has come under fire for several controversies over human rights. Reports about this relate, among other things, to the expulsion of the local population. The case of Fatima al-Shawarbi is also related to this.

30 years in prison for tweeting against NEOM

A few days ago, ALQST announced that Fatima Al-Shawarbi had been sentenced to 30 years in prison for tweeting about the project. She was reportedly arrested again in 2020. Specifically, she was said to have criticized the government for the inhumane treatment of people in Saudi Arabia, where a large portion of the population has been forcibly evicted from their homes to make room for the construction of planned projects. According to ALQST, she has also criticized the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia and is said to have called for a constitutional monarchy instead of the current absolute system. However, it remains unclear how the Saudi authorities discovered that the anonymous tweets actually came from Fatima Al-Shawarbi.

Prisoners’ hunger strike

Lina Al-Hathloul of ALQST also revealed that Al-Shawarbi had recently begun a hunger strike with other female prisoners. Among them is Salma Al Shehab, a doctoral student at the University of Leeds, who was arrested in 2020 for criticizing the Saudi government on Twitter. Al-Hathloul said that Al-Shawarbi’s health is currently unknown.

He criticizes the West, but continues to invest

Saudi Arabia has long been criticized for its human rights violations. Amnesty International It stated that the state practices torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, and violates the right to freedom of expression and assembly. Despite reports from Western human rights organizations, Saudi Arabia continues to attract wealthy Western companies to invest in the NEOM project.

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