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Saudi Arabia: Woman Sentenced to 45 Years in Prison for Tweeting

Saudi Arabia: Woman sentenced to 45 years in prison for tweeting

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Saudi Arabia sentenced a Saudi woman to 45 years in prison on Tuesday for “using the internet to tear at the fabric of society” and expressing her critical views on Twitter, just weeks after another woman was sentenced to 34 years in prison on similar charges.

Democracy Now for the Arab World (DAWN), which had access to the court document, said in a statement that a specialized terrorism court in the Arab kingdom found Nura al-Qahtani guilty of “using the internet to tear the social fabric” of the country and “violating public order with the use of social networks.”

The Saudi, who was also accused of “criticizing the rulers” of the country, was convicted under the Anti-Terrorism Law and the Cybercrimes Law, which are commonly used by the Saudi authorities to prosecute activists or critics of the Arab monarchy, according to the NGO.

This new sentence comes just two weeks after another Saudi woman, Salma al Shehab, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for her activity on Twitter, then the longest sentence imposed in the kingdom for peacefully expressing her views, according to human rights organizations.

DAWN’s Persian Gulf research director, Abdullah Alaoudh, said in the statement that this new sentence “shows how emboldened the Saudi authorities feel to punish even the mildest criticism of their citizens.”

“In both the Al Shehab and Al Qahtani cases, Saudi authorities have used abusive laws to target and punish Saudi citizens for criticizing the government on Twitter,” he added.

For its part, the UK-based Saudi organization ALQST condemned the sentence and denounced “an alarming deterioration of the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia.”

Last week, the NGO Gulf Center for Human Rights denounced that Saudi authorities have also charged Lina al-Sharif, a doctor who has been detained since May 2021 for expressing her views on social networks, with terrorism.

Following the conviction of Al Shehab, UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Liz Throssell said that this is “another example of Saudi authorities using terrorism and cybercrime laws to intimidate and retaliate against human rights defenders and any dissenting voices.”

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