Saudis’ new family regulations are viewed as victory for women
BEIRUT — On the surface, the new regulations Saudi Arabia announced Friday did not seem like much. In dense, bureaucratic language, they granted all Saudis older than 21 the right to handle family matters and their own affairs, while officials said all adults could obtain passports and travel on their own.
But for gender relations in the kingdom, the new regulations were an earthquake, because for the first time they granted women the kind of rights that had previously been under the control of male relatives.
“It is a great breakthrough,” said Hoda al-Helaissi, a member of the kingdom’s advisory Shura Council. “It was bound to happen, but these changes are always done at a time when the people are more apt to accept the changes; otherwise, they will fail.”
The new regulations that arrived under Saudi Arabia’s day-today ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were the most significant weakening yet of Saudi Arabia’s “guardianship” system, a long-standing tangle of laws, regulations and social customs that rights campaigners have long criticized as oppressing Saudi women. As a practical matter, the changes will most likely take time to trickle down to individual households and to women. As a symbolic matter, however, they are pivotal.
Muna AbuSulayman, a wellknown Saudi media personality, posted on Twitter that she was so elated that she could not sleep. “This change means women are in a way in full control of their legal destiny,” she wrote.
Other Saudi women’s Twitter feeds crackled with jubilant posts. Memes of women praising the crown prince and howling in celebration danced around the internet.
On Thursday evening, Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, the kingdom’s ambassador to the United States and Saudi Arabia’s first female ambassador, wrote on Twitter that “our leadership has proved its unequivocal commitment to gender equality.”
She added: “These new regulations are history in the making. They call for the equal engagement of women and men in our society.”
The guardianship changes were announced as part of a broader drive by Mohammed to overhaul the kingdom’s economy and open up society. Since his father, King Salman, ascended to the throne in 2015, the crown prince, 33, has begun initiatives aimed at diversifying the economy away from oil, confronting Iran and loosening the kingdom’s notoriously strict social customs.
In recent years, he has pushed for more women to enter the workforce, removed the power to arrest from the kingdom’s religious police and granted women the right to drive, billing the moves as essential for the insular Islamic kingdom to progress and build its economy.
Al-Helaissi, the Shura Council member, said she did not expect the changes to have a big, immediate effect on most families but that the biggest beneficiaries would be divorced or widowed women who could now run their family affairs more easily.
Although the regulations allowing women to run family matters may appear routine, they will make an enormous difference for some women, such as those who are separated from their husbands and those who need to navigate the bureaucracy on behalf of their children, said Adam Coogle, a Saudi expert at Human Rights Watch.
In the past, he said, separated women have reported being punished or extorted by husbands who would not help obtain birth certificates or other records for children.