Saudi Arabia releases PhD student sentenced to 34 years in prison for tweets

Saudi Arabia has released a PhD student who was sentenced to 34 years in prison for posting tweets in support of women’s rights, human rights groups have said. The London-based ALQST Human Rights Foundation said on Monday evening that Salma Al-Shehab was released after spending “four years in arbitrary detention due to her peaceful activism.”

The rights watchdog called on the Saudi authorities to grant her “full freedom, including the right to travel to complete her doctoral studies in the UK.” She was studying at Leeds University at the time of her imprisonment.

Lina Al-Hathloul, head of communications at ALQST said yesterday that Al-Shehab went through a “difficult” experience and did not see her two young children during her detention. “Moreover, she was forced to go on a hunger strike in March 2023 for several weeks to obtain treatment in prison,” she explained. “Her release is far from freedom, as life under a travel ban means life with a potential threat of arrest.”

Al-Shehab, 36, a mother of two and a doctoral student on a scholarship from Princess Noura University in Saudi Arabia, was arrested while visiting her family in the Kingdom in January 2021. She was initially sentenced to six years in prison, but in August 2022 the Court of Appeal increased the sentence to 34 years.

The sentence was later commuted to 27 years and then to four years in September 2024, with a travel ban for the same period.

Al-Shehab comes from a Shia Muslim family from the city of Al-Mubarraz in Al-Ahsa in eastern Saudi Arabia. She is not a prominent activist. Her Twitter (X) account was followed by about 2,600 people, and her posts focused on defending women’s rights.

Amnesty International said in a report about her in 2022 that her only “crime” was nothing more than “publishing tweets in support of women’s rights.”

Saudi Arabia has imprisoned dozens of dissidents, clerics and activists, many of them women and ordinary citizens, under a counterterrorism law adopted in 2017, months after Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was appointed crown prince in June of that year.

Dozens of those imprisoned received lengthy and harsh prison sentences, including prominent feminist activists Manal Al-Otaibi, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison, and Noura Al-Qahtani, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison, for social media posts.

However, this sensitive issue in Saudi Arabia has recently witnessed a major breakthrough. In December, the Saudi authorities released many prisoners, most notably Mohammed Al-Qahtani, co- founder of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, which was dissolved in 2013. Al-Qahtani was released more than two years after his sentence ended in November 2022.

The authorities also released academic Malik Al-Ahmad and preacher Mohammed Al-Habdan, who were arrested as part of a large-scale arrest campaign in September 2017.

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