A Saudi woman retweeted human rights activists while studying for her PHD in the UK. During a visit home, she was arrested for sharing her views and sentenced to 34 years in prison. 'They charged her for 34 years over 280 characters.'
Salma al-Shehab, a 34-year-old mother of two, was an active Twitter user while studying for a doctoral degree at the University of Leeds School of Medicine in the United Kingdom. She posted her own tweets about human rights issues as well as retweeting activists.
Salma al-Shehab was arrested just days before she planned to return to her residence in the English city of Leeds, rights groups said.The charges against her included sedition and spreading false and malicious rumors on Twitter, according to the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights, a Berlin-based group critical of the Saudi government.
The Saudi Embassy in London and the Saudi Ministry of Media did not respond to requests for the details of and comment on al-Shehab’s case. Al-Hathloul’s sister, Lina, was one of the activist accounts that al-Shehab retweeted in the months before her arrest. She’s now head of monitoring and communications for ALQST, a group that focuses on human rights in Saudi Arabia. In an interview, she said the sentence shows “that Saudi Arabia’s promises on women’s rights reforms are only words, it’s ink on paper, and that the situation of women and women’s rights activists is not improving, but getting worse by the day.
“This is a new shift that is a consequence, a direct consequence, of the international community kind of brushing aside horrible human rights violations,” she said.
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