Breaking through
Saudi Arabia extends new rights to women in blow to oppressive male guardianship system
SBEIRUT ome Saudi women joked about rushing to the airport — alone. Others breathed a sigh of relief that the men in their lives — whether fathers, brothers or husbands — could no longer dictate their movements. Social media crackled with ecstatic posts: memes of women praising the crown prince and ululating in celebration.
The jubilation came Friday as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman extended a passel of new rights to women: the right to travel without a male relative’s permission, to receive equal treatment in the workplace and to obtain family documents from the government. Together, they were a significant blow against a system that has long treated women as second-class citizens.
“This change means women are in a way in full control of their legal destiny,” Muna AbuSulayman, a well-known Saudi media personality, wrote on Twitter. She said she was so elated that she could not sleep.
The new regulations were the most significant weakening yet of Saudi Arabia’s so-called guardianship system, a long-standing tangle of laws, regulations and social customs that subjected many women’s rights to the whims of their male relatives. Coming after new regulations allowing women to drive and attend entertainment and sporting events, the changes have the potential to be a game changer, not only for women but for Saudi society.
“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 advances for women are a key piece of Crown Prince Mohammed’s vision for reforming the kingdom by diversifying the economy and loosening social restrictions. Since his father ascended to the throne in 2015, the crown prince, the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler, has won plaudits for taming the kingdom’s religious police, allowing movie theaters, concerts and lifting the ban on women driving.
But along with that social opening have come riskier moves that have raised questions about his brash leadership style, including his catastrophic war in Yemen, the jailing of dissidents at home, and the effort to silence them abroad, including the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Even as Crown Prince Mohammed opened
new doors for Saudi women, critics pointed out, some women who had campaigned for those rights remained in jail or on trial for their activism.
At least some of the changes to the guardianship laws are to take effect by the end of the month, the government said in a statement. But they will likely take longer to flow through the Saudi bureaucracy to individual households, and some women said they would only be truly equal once they received other rights they still lack, such as the ability to marry or live on their own without a male relative’s permission. Even so, the changes were pivotal. “These new regulations are history in the making,” Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, the kingdom’s ambassador to the United States and Saudi Arabia’s first female ambassador, wrote on Twitter. “They call for the equal engagement of women and men in our society.”
She added: “Our leadership has proved its unequivocal commitment to gender equality.”
In recent years, the crown prince has loosened restrictions on women’s dress and pushed for more women to enter the workforce, billing the social opening as essential to build the insular Islamic kingdom’s economy.
It was not clear why the new regulations were announced now, but the news was likely to draw some attention from the mounting foreign criticism of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.
The murder of Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year drew global condemnation. Saudi forces are bogged down and accused of war crimes in Yemen, leading to growing calls by U.S. lawmakers to cut support for the Saudi war effort. And waves of arrests have scooped up clerics, intellectuals, royals, businessmen and activists who had campaigned for an end to the guardianship system.
A number of young Saudi women have fled abroad in recent years, seeking refuge from abusive family members and a legal system they do not trust to protect them, drawing unwanted attention to the guardianship system.
The arrests, and the wider intolerance of dissent under Crown Prince Mohammed, made it hard to fully gauge public reaction to the changes, but many Saudi women cheered them as liberating.
The regulations allowing women to register births, marriages and divorces will make an enormous difference for women 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 bureaucratic records for children.