Saudi Arabia: Woman sentenced to 34 years in prison for…Twitter  

He was in favor of women’s right to drive

A woman in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 34 years in prison because of her tweets. Salma al-Shehab supported women’s right to drive and retweeted other activists. She lived in the United Kingdom, where she did her master’s degree at the University of Leeds. He was arrested in 2021 when he returned to Saudi Arabia on vacation.

He was initially sentenced to six years in prison for ” disrupting order and destabilizing the security and stability of the country “.

But prosecutors asked during the appeal for a stiffer sentence under cybercrime and counterterrorism laws. Thus, her sentence was changed to 34 years in prison and as reported by the Freedom Initiative, this is the harshest sentence received by someone fighting for women’s rights in the country.

The case files state that Shebab ” helped those who sought to destabilize national security by following their Twitter accounts and retweeting them .”

Shebab had just 2,597 followers on Twitter. In between tweets about exhaustion due to COVID and photos of her two children, she also sometimes retweeted exiled Saudi activists, calling for the release of some political prisoners. She also supported an activist who had been jailed and tortured for advocating for women’s right to drive.

According to the Guardian , the country’s head of state, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), owns a large percentage of Twitter’s shares through Saudi Arabia’s investment fund, PIF. Twitter offered no comment on the case.