28 February 2007
TRAVEL BANS IMPOSED ON GOVERNMENT CRITICS
Saudi Arabia has barred prominent government critics from foreign travel without regard to Saudi or international law, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to King Abdullah on 9 February 2007. Underlying these bans appears to be a desire to punish government critics and to prevent their views from reaching a foreign audience.
The letter details travel bans on 22 people, including Matruk Alfalih, Abdullah al-Hamid, and Ali al-Dumaini, three constitutional and political reformers whom the king pardoned in August 2005 after they were sentenced to prison for their writings.
Saudi authorities had arrested them in 2004 with nine others, later released, for signing a petition for reform.
Seven of the nine, including their lawyer, remain banned from foreign travel; nine others were banned for publicly supporting the reforms.
The Ministry of Interior, which imposed the travel bans, refuses to hear appeals from many of those banned.
Alfalih, a political science professor at King Sa`ud University, has been unable to take up a sabbatical position at the University of Seattle in the United States. In January 2007, Ibrahim al-Mugaiteeb, president of Human Rights First in Saudi Arabia, discovered he was on the travel ban list for a second time.
Human Rights Watch raised the travel bans with the Ministry of Interior and the governmental Human Rights Commission during a November 2006 fact-finding mission. A high-ranking Ministry of Interior official promised to investigate the bans.
During the visit several liberal Internet sites became inaccessible from within Saudi Arabia, including Jasad al-Thaqafa, al-Hurriya and Wadi Najran. Also in November, prominent Saudi newspaper writers were prohibited from publishing, and several journalists said secret police had arrested the Medina bureau chief for "al-Watan" newspaper on the basis of two of his articles.
In the same month, the government prohibited its employees from "opposing the policies or programs of the state ... by participating in any discussion through media channels or through domestic or foreign communications."
In a 2006 report, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that while there were signs of more tolerant attitudes towards media, government officials still dismiss editors, suspend or blacklist dissident writers, order news blackouts and penalise independent columnists.
Saudi Arabia's conservative religious establishment is a powerful lobby regarding media coverage, CPJ concluded, and compliant government-approved editors censor controversial news, acquiesce to official pressures and silence critical voices.
In its annual report for 2007, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières, RSF) said Saudi Arabia remains one of world's biggest enemies of press freedom. The Saudi regime maintains tight control of all news and self-censorship is pervasive, RSF said.
Visit these links:
- IFEX: http://ifex.org/en/content/view/full/81146/
- Human Rights Watch: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/02/14/saudia15335.htm
- RSF: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=20775
- CPJ: http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2006/saudI_06/saudi_06.html
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