guardian.co.uk,
Luke Harding, and agencies in Riyadh, 23 November 2012
 |
| Saudi women must have the permission of their male 'guardian' to go abroad. Photograph: Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images |
Saudi Arabia has been accused of behaving like Big Brother after introducing technology
that alerts male "guardians" by text whenever women under their
guardianship leave the country.
The kingdom
already bans women from driving and excludes them from most workplaces. It also
disapproves of women's sport. Since last week it has been operating a new
electronic system that tracks all cross-border movements.
The system
functions even if a woman is travelling with her husband or male
"guardian", with a text sent immediately to the man. Saudi women must
get formal approval from their guardians to travel abroad, and have to hand in
an infamous "yellow slip", signed by a male, at the airport or
border.
The move
has prompted protests. "The new compulsory text service, compliments of
the Saudi ministry of interior, is not only a vicious reminder that Big Brother
is watching me but that now he will snitch and tell my 'guardian' every time I
leave the country," Safa Alahmad, a freelance journalist and documentary
maker, said. "Apparently, as a Saudi woman, I don't even deserve the
simplest of rights like the right to privacy. The core issue remains the same.
Saudi women are viewed and treated as minors by the Saudi government. A text
message doesn't change that. It's just adding insult to injury."
"The
authorities are using technology to monitor women," the columnist Badriya
al-Bashr wrote, criticising the "state of slavery under which [Saudi]
women are held".
Some
Twitter users compared the Riyadh government to the Taliban. Others jokingly
suggested women should be microchipped to keep tabs on them.
Manal
al-Sharif, a well-known women's right campaigner, raised the alarm over the new
text system on Twitter after a couple alerted her. The husband was travelling
with his wife when he received an unprompted text at Riyadh international
airport saying she had left the country.
Sharif, 33,
attracted global attention last year when she led an underground civil
disobedience campaign to allow women to drive. About 100 women took part. Many
were arrested and jailed; one was sentenced to 10 lashes, and later reprieved.
In June Sharif posted an open letter to King Abdullah appealing again for an
end to the ban on women driving, the only law of its kind in the world.
Bloggers in
Saudi Arabia have pointed out that the new text system does not merely apply to women. Text messages are also sent to male "guardians" whenever any
of their "dependants", deemed to be children of both sexes and
foreign workers, leave the country.
The
interior ministry introduced the system in April as part of its modernising
e-government plan. The goal was to replace the "yellow slip" with
electronic permission to leave. The text messages were originally sent to
"guardians" who opted into the system, but are now apparently being
sent out universally.
According
to Human Rights Watch, guardians can include a woman's husband, father, brother
or even minor son. They enjoy extraordinary power over female relatives of all
ages. They can approve or reject their travel, work, marriages, official
business and even healthcare.
Apart from
areas such as education and healthcare, women are mostly excluded from the
workplace. The labour ministry passed several new decrees in July theoretically
increasing the number of jobs available to women. But under pressure from
religious conservatives it also restated that strict segregation laws, relaxed
in 2005, should apply in the workplace.
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