Saudi Arabia allows women to travel independently
Nation chips away at reviled guardianship system
BEIRUT, Lebanon – Saudi Arabia has ended a bevy of legal restrictions on women – including restraints on applying for passports and traveling abroad without the approval of a male relative – in what was celebrated as another step in the dismantling of the much-vilified “Wilayah,” or guardianship system.
Saudi monarch King Salman issued a royal decree outlining the amendments to the country’s laws following a Cabinet decision earlier this week. They were published in the government’s weekly official gazette, Um Al-qura, on Friday.
Under the changes, all Saudi nationals can now get a passport as long they are over 21. A clause registering wives and children under a man’s passport was removed.
Saudi Arabia’s longstanding guardianship system has been a frequent target of human rights campaigners for its treatment of women as legal minors.
Under the system, women required permission from a husband, father or male relative to obtain or renew a passport or use it to leave the country. (Men had an app, named Absher, through which they could enforce the permissions.)
Major medical procedures, as well as issues regarding personal status, were also under the authority of male guardians.
A statement from the kingdom’s information ministry said the changes would come into effect at the end of August.
Potentially more significant for Saudi women than the permission to travel are some of the other regulatory changes, including those that allow any Saudi citizen over 21, male or female, to be a head of household and register births, deaths, marriages, divorces as well as have custody over minors.
The amendments also state that all Saudis “are equal in the right to work” regardless of sex, age or other criteria, and that employers are barred from firing women in their employ or threatening to do so during pregnancy or maternity leave, as long as the women are not absent for a cumulative period of six months of a year.
“This is another leap toward treating women as adults who do not need the permission of a male guardian and are equal citizens in terms of rights and status,” said Maha Aqeel, a writer and director of the information department at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, in a phone interview on Friday.
“The essential thing here is that these issues are finally being addressed and resolved and I expect the discussion will continue over other issues and details affecting not only women but society as a whole.”
Many commentators took to Twitter, Saudi Arabia’s most popular social media platform, celebrating the amendments under the hashtag “The Guardianship system has fallen” and others.
The decree is the latest to be spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has mounted a high-intensity charm offensive aimed at opening up Saudi Arabia to outside investment while decreasing the kingdom’s reliance on its gargantuan oil wealth and the foreign labor it has attracted.
Along the way, the prince has railroaded changes in the kingdom’s social order that seemed out of reach not that long ago, including the removal of the country’s notorious religious police. He also overturned a ban on women driving last year, and allowed the opening of cinemas for the first time in decades.
Yet for many, those changes mattered little in light of the guardianship system. This year, a number of Saudi women have fled what they said were abusive guardians, publicizing their cases in order to prevent their forced return to the kingdom.
The reform drive has also been accompanied by a violence-laced aversion to criticism by the authorities. Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a onetime government insider turned mild critic of the prince’s policies, was murdered last year at the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul. Activists, including those who had championed women’s rights for decades, remain imprisoned.