Caning of Saudi Blogger Is Delayed Amid Protests

 

""Speaking through Skype from Jidda, Samar Badawi said her problems began after she fled her father’s house and moved into a shelter for battered women. Her father, angry that she had left, filed a lawsuit against her in 2009 for “parental disobedience.”

For her defense, she took on a young lawyer named Waleed Abulkhair, who had started a group to track human rights in Saudi Arabia, and the two found common ground in their activism.

The couple decided to marry, but Ms. Badawi’s father withheld his consent. So she sued him under a Saudi law that makes it illegal to prevent a woman from marrying.At the first court hearing in that lawsuit, she was arrested on the disobedience charge and spent six months in jail,

The couple worked together on rights campaigns, calling for women to have the right to drive in the kingdom and criticizing Saudi Arabia’s guardianship system, which generally bars women from working, marrying or traveling abroad without the permission of a male guardian.

But the Saudi government was pursuing her husband, barring him from traveling abroad, detaining him for holding “unauthorized gatherings” and charging him with various crimes, including seeking to overthrow the head of state, tarnishing the reputation of the judiciary and forming an unlicensed organization, according to a State Department report. Mr. Abulkhair was convicted last year and is now serving a 15-year prison sentence.

Meanwhile, Ms. Badawi’s brother, Raif, started a website called “Free Saudi Liberal Network” that featured writings by him and others who had often criticized Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment.

Mr. Badawi’s wife said he was arrested at a supermarket in 2012. A Saudi court convicted him of running a website that promoted “heresy” and of not removing comments that were considered insulting to God, Islam and prominent Saudi clerics, according to court documents.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 blows, to be given in installments of 50 with at least a week in between; he was also fined more than $250,000.

In the video showing the first installment on Jan. 9, a uniformed security officer swiftly strikes Mr. Badawi up and down his back with a wooden cane as a crowd looks on. Mr. Badawi squirms a bit, and the crowd applauds and yells “God is great!” as he is led away."

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Caning of Saudi Blogger Is Delayed Amid Protests - NYTimes.com