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Is it just me, or is it that ever since Saudi Arabia joined the UN Women's Rights Council that they have changed quite a few policies?

I was very critical of this initially, but if it results in pro-women changes, then that's good.

They've changed policies for now. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, however, so we'll have to hope these changes stick with the next ruler.
Wow, did not expect that from King Salman. He's supposed to be quite the hardliner as compared to his predecessor.
Article similarities aside, those might be two of the worst websites to quote as sources, the Daily Mail is banned from being cited on Wikipedia as it's not a reputable source; and the Independent is no longer producing what many people would consider journalism.
There's a lot of that going around these days...
Those two links came up when I typed my initial search to verify the original source. When I later changed my query to "saudi arabia male guardianship" I found the main stream of related articles on Google News:

https://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=d8vQiW5woz_iD_MaFaFAQ...

Note: I am not evaluating thousands of sourced references per day like Wikipedia - nor do I have a partisan political agenda. In this case, I evaluated the source content and it seemed fairly apolitical. Very likely, both of my linked sources used an AP or Reuters articles as their primary source.

To think in 2017 that this isn't the norm around the world just goes to show how good we have it in the west and how far we as a species has to go.
This is the norm around the world. Saudi and wherever this is not already the norm are in the minority.
That's true, but think how much worse things would be if modern western civilization had never happened.
I wouldn't go down the what-if road. While it is obvious that human rights are a result of progressive European and American countries. But the world would be a much different place if the Europeans didn't go around colonizing. Several of the Victorian era rules imposed by the Britishers in India were regressive. They also caused communal divisions for their own gains. It's not fair to forget the evils of imperialism while basking in the grandeur of industrialization.
It really puts the new-wave American feminism into perspective. Americans/Europeans/Nords are living in a great time for equality. It's not perfect but:

> This is the norm.

China, India, Africa, the Middle East, parts of America and Europe - That is the norm or analagous to it.

Women don't need permission from a man to travel, make a police complaint or study in China, India and almost everywhere else, certainly not by law like this story. I'm just saying that it is the norm in almost everywhere in the world in 2017, Saudi Arabia is an aberration.
They still have a king!

This is not normal. It's pure crazy town.

A large chunk of the world still has Monarchs. The only notable thing about the Saudi one is that he still has power.
"The order made by King Salman, pictured, is the latest in a series of steps to include more women in the workforce to help diversify the country’s economy and reduce its reliance on oil"

So this tells us a couple of things:

1. If this whole oppressing women thing was ever about religion (that is their justification), they are pretty willing to forget religion when they need money.

2. That whole oil thing isn't going so great for them these days.

The whole oil thing isn't going well for them. The whole OPEC agreement seems to have holes, and fracking is becoming cheaper as the process improves putting a max on what oil can be sold for. We'll see post IPO.
Near as I can tell, the oil industry has been a series of boom/bust cycles since the '20s. OPEC has always been this way as well, it's always been a gentleman's agreement of sorts, not to mention the sanctioned countries operating outside of the open market. It's also important to note that "oil" varies quite a bit in its composition and the process to refine oil of different qualities requires significant refinery (re)configurations.
True, Saudi & ND / TX shale oil are high quality where Canada's oil sands and Venezuela are not. Although it is very cheap for SA to produce oil, shale is getting cheaper (which has made the oil sands less desirable). The recent OPEC agreement to limit oil just doesn't seem to be working.
Look, I'm super cynical and I make statements that group people together like this too; but that said: King fights religious & cultural bias to promote a more equitable set of norms; works on fixing reliance on a finite and harmful resource for sustainability

Your response was that all of "them" (hundreds or millions of people potentially depending on how you define it) are backward. Religion isn't math; it's subjective. Not a subscriber myself but I welcome the reinterpretation.

Oil / The economy isn't going so great. 1) It is certainly generating income and power. 2) The most wealthy and powerful beneficiary announced he's trying to distribute the money using that power and transform it in a positive way

> Religion isn't math; it's subjective.

No I'm sorry. It is objectively delusional.

It's objectively (1) a very early way to make sense of the world and (2) a way to set up ready made norms and values for even your most unintelligent parts of society. It's very effective at those things.

That said: we have science now for the first bit, which is much more effective at that job minus the simplicity. What do we have to replace the second part?

Sports.

I should probably expand on that somewhat tongue in cheek answer. It's a pretty cynical response, but there's truth in it. Following and/or playing sports provides people with a tribe and a set of shared values and camaraderie. Much like religion, I've never felt the need for this, but there's certainly a very large set of people who do.

Agreed. I think all organized religion should be disbanded. Too much violence results when people believe in fairy tales.
>Religion isn't math; it's subjective

No it's not. At least it's not in the case of Abraham religions. Each of these religions have texts that claim to come from God. And the content of these texts are about as open to interpretation as the sentences I'm typing now . . . which is not very. They're relatively clear and not all that open to interpretation.

What? All Abrahamic religious texts are notoriously ambiguous and self-contradictory. History of religion is the study of sectarian conflict.
This was never about religion. This was always about the royal family maintaining power. In 1979, they implemented laws repressing women and otherwise increasing social authority of clerics in order to avoid having the same fate as the Shah of Iran. Now with the economy slowly failing and with the recent example of the Arab Spring in other countries with economic trouble, they need to liberalize the workforce to stave off an Arab Spring of their own. The Sauds have been educated at the most expensive Western schools and are not the backwards nomads that they rule over.
>But Saudi Arabia was still ranked 141 of 144 countries in the 2016 Global Gender Gap

So apparently there are 3 countries below SA. To find out what these odd places are I went to http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2016/ran.... And apparently these 3 countries are Syria, Pakistan and Yemen! How is that even possible? Didn't Pakistan had a female prime minister? And I believe there were no rigorous restrictions on clothings or driving or working for women in any of these countries.

Maybe if you overlook the honour killings and fored marriages
There are regions in all three countries controlled by Taliban/Al Qaeda. Maybe that was factored into it on top of the official laws of each country, which I also presume are more liberal than those of the KSA.
The female prime minister of Pakistan was Benazir Bhutto, a scion of the wealthy and powerful Bhutto family. Her father was a former prime minister, Zulfikar Bhutto. Gender gaps do not apply to women from wealthy and powerful backgrounds.
Women are still not considered their own legal person in Saudi Arabia. While this is progress, for sure, this upgrades the position of women from outright slaves (perhaps comparable to the legal status of a dog or other pet in the west), and this doesn't change that.

In sharia/islam, women are the legal property (effectively, not "in legal theory") of their "guardian". When they're married (yes I'm using the passive, they don't get to pick when, where & to whom after all) that becomes their husband. They have full legal authority over them.

In fact they have less rights than a dog has in the West: in legal theory, you cannot legally just abandon a dog in the west, but you can just abandon a woman, even if you're her guardian, in Saudi Arabia.

> you can just abandon a woman

Maybe I misunderstand, but I think you can do that in the West. Or are you just saying there aren't alimony payments?

once abandoned she can be arrested for being in public without a man. Raped. Then whipped for adultery because she was raped. Seriously, if you put it in a novel about a fictitious country you'd be accused of hyperbole.

Saudi Arabia, allies to the west where they cut peoples heads off in public with a sword because they think they're gay. No really. Our allies. If Saudi doesn't make you think there could be a problem with war machine corruption driving invasion in the middle east, what would? Iran is very civilized by comparison, yeah the bozos with the death sentence for a Booker Prize winning author, Rushdie, look good in comparison. McCain still singing "Bomb Iran, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of the beach boys? Nobody seems to hold Saudi responsible for originating bin laden and most of the 9/11 hijackers. If any nation state was responsible for that it's saudi, not Iraq.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doKhX4poO0o

Saudi, our allies. Makes you sick, don't it?

>once abandoned she can be arrested for being in public without a man. Raped. Then whipped for adultery because she was raped. Seriously, if you put it in a novel about a fictitious country you'd be accused of hyperbole.

The fact that this can be posted and unchallenged for 2 hours on this website is interesting considering the userbase typically touts themselves as on the right end of the intellectual bell curve.

But the left end of the political curve. And since Muslim immigrants tend to vote Democrat, all Muslims have become immune to criticism.
> And since Muslim immigrants tend to vote Democrat

Muslims immigrants were, at least up until post-9/11 scapegoating, a fairly reliable Republican voting bloc. If there has been a shift since, it was a reaction to (rather than the cause of) the absence (or at least lesser level) of anti-Muslim rhetoric from the Democrats.

But the Left (or Democrats, which aren't the same thing, but it's true either way) have not treated all Muslims as beyond criticism, they've just tended to avoid bigoted, sweeping attacks on Muslims as a group or Islam itself.

an observation is the left will look the other way if they can use a group or coopt a group to further a cause --moreso if the group is considered underprivileged in the US --never mind their status in their home country or what they do to others in their home country, or the ideas they espouse at home or in the US, so long as they can be used to a political end. Some republicans do something similar with a couple of countries in the ME who are on the other side of the spectrum. The difference, as I can tell is dems like to play identity politcs a lot, the repubs don't care as long as you share their pro-biz agenda.
A more charitable, and in my opinion more accurate observation is that equality for the underprivileged is in itself an important cause for the left, more so than for the right, but like any movement there are plenty of people who coopt that for personal ends.

I'm inclined to feel that the latter is more problematic on the Republican side because a pro-biz agenda is more directly beneficial to opportunists, but honestly I don't think it's very useful to spend much time discussing which side is more evil. At the very least I don't think Democrats are worse than Republicans when it comes to 'coopting'.

To be clear, I don't identify as strictly left, although I'm probably more left than right if I had to pick. And I'm also not saying that 'the right' doesn't care about the underprivileged; far from it! Rather it seems to be less part of their core agenda (for reasons that I've become somewhat more sympathetic to over the past years).

Rape victims are punished in Saudi Arabia: https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/11/15/saudi-arabia-rape-victim...

Unilateral and immediate divorce by males for no reason is legal in Saudi Arabia (talaq) and just forces the husband to provide support for 4 months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_system_of_Saudi_Arabia#F...

Being in violation of gender segregation is a punishable offense more harshly punished than rape: http://www.webcitation.org/6JdMstMvl

Until 2015, divorced women had no legal status: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/saudi-arabian-...

You know, I will fight unjustified islamophobic caricature anytime, amywhere, but Saudi Arabia is the epitome of why theocracies suck and is at the root of many things that gives Islam a bad name. Bin Laden, ISIS, salafist imams in Europe, etc...

We overthrew the Talebans (partly) for moral reasons. If we had been serious and honest about these reasons, Saudi Arabia should have been on the "axis of evil" too.

Rape victims arn't punished in Saudi Arabia. Theres no crime of being raped. The woman in your one anecdotal point was charged with a seperate case of adultery during a rape trial that wasn't in conjunction with the rape. Furthermore the rapists were charged and punished for rape, an act that is illegal. If you want to argue about adultery being a crime then go for it but don't conflate to topics to spread something factually incorrect.

Theres plenty of things to criticise Saudi for. Just like theres plenty of things to criticise America for (institutional racism, foreign policy, drug laws etc) and every other country.

"I will fight unjustified islamophobic caricature anytime".

Evidently you won't because here you are spreading caricatures of islam targeting rape victims.

"We overthrew the Talebans (partly) for moral reasons. If we had been serious and honest about these reasons, Saudi Arabia should have been on the "axis of evil" too." If you were serious about "these reasons" then America would probably be higher on the list than 3rd world Afghanistan.

Come on now.

> Rape victims arn't punished in Saudi Arabia. Theres no crime of being raped.

True, but they did commit adultery when they were raped. Technically, they aren't punished for being raped, but in reality, they are punished for being raped.

No that's factually wrong. If you read about the case you would know the adultery issue was separate, was consensual and had nothing to do with the rape except for the fact that the judges responded to both separate cases during the same trial.
Where did you read there was a second "offence" by the victim ?
In the actual report regarding the trial and retrial.
Can you provide a link ?
Ah yes, so your case is that women are equal in islam because, she was not convicted JUST for being raped. She was being convicted for talking to someone initially, because it "led to rape" (from the article linked on wikipedia).

Then, based on an unwritten confession, without so much as mentioning what the victim "confessed", the sentence was increased. In defense of this, famously, on live TV, a former Saudi judge and current consultant to the justice ministry called the rape victim a "cheating spouse" to her husband (for being raped ...).

Furthermore it is apparently customary for rape cases to prosecute both the criminal and the victim [1], and the justification for this, as stated by the government is that islam demands it.

Is this supposed to be a defense ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Saudi_Arabia

> Rape victims arn't punished in Saudi Arabia. Theres no crime of being raped. The woman in your one anecdotal point was charged with a seperate case of adultery during a rape trial that wasn't in conjunction with the rape. Furthermore the rapists were charged and punished for rape, an act that is illegal. If you want to argue about adultery being a crime then go for it but don't conflate to topics to spread something factually incorrect.

Since you're accusing human rights watch from inaccurately reporting this ... can you provide a citation for your new fact that there was a second offence ? Or are you perhaps claiming that while the rape was an offence of the rapists, getting raped was a separate offence by the victim ?

I would also like to point out that punishing rape victims is part of islamic rules:

e.g. "if a man comes upon a man, then they are both adulterers," "If a woman comes upon a woman, they are both Adulteresses," "When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes," and "Kill the one that is doing it and also kill the one that it is being done to." (Abu Dawud 4462 and al-Tirmidhi 1456)

Google it to find more references than you could ever need to be satisfied. And yes, this is about gay sex, but is widely interpreted to include gay rape. Getting raped by someone of the same sex as you is punishable by death according to sharia. Are you seriously disputing this ?

And just so we're clear. We're talking about this Saudi Arabia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Mecca_girls%27_school_fir...

Where the "religious police" beat up firefighters and sent rescued girls BACK INTO THEIR BURNING DORMATORIES because of the mingling laws ... at least 15 did not survive.

hrw is lying.

OK, not lying but being deceiving.

They never actually say she was sentenced for being raped if you read it carefully.

Why have they done this?

So let me get this straight.

In order to believe that this is not in fact the case, you suggest that human rights watch is a conspiracy against Saudi Arabia, or perhaps against islam. And we are to believe that, as opposed to the many different sources pointing out that islam assigns second-class status to women, and Saudi Arabia forces that on women, on your word, without so much as a single source.

Can you provide some sources for this ?

I'm not sure what else I can do other than give you the HRW link again?

https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/11/15/saudi-arabia-rape-victim...

Please read it carefully, they never say she was prosecuted for being raped.

The article is specifically written to fool people.

Unless you can explain why if she was prosecuted for being raped HRW omitted that information?

from the link:

>A court may view a woman’s charge of rape as an admission of extramarital sexual relations (or “illegal mingling”) unless she can prove, by strict evidentiary standards, that this contact was legal and the intercourse was nonconsensual.

So once again, they have not said this was applied to this particular case, why?

Try to read between the lines. It's a handy tool to have. This article is decietful. The above paragraph is OT to what I was saying. But you'll notice they use words like 'may' and they don't say it was relevant in this case. They are playing games with the truth. And that's something I particularly don't agree with.

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To be frank, I find the supposition that you are deceitful much easier to believe than the idea that Human Rights Watch is conspiring to give Islam/Saudia Arabia a bad name.

Given that Saudi Arabia doesn't even have a criminal code at all, of course they make statements like that. Judges simply enforce (their idea of) islam, rather than any legal code. There is no rulebook like in pretty much every other country on the planet. So judicial randomness is the norm, rather than the exception (and of course, one might even say this is not the fault of the judges, as they don't make the law, this is the fault of the government refusing to govern).

First note that my source isn't a tabloid, this is Human Rights Watch. They check their sources.

> The woman in your one anecdotal point was charged with a seperate case of adultery during a rape trial that wasn't in conjunction with the rape.

From the article:

"The young woman, who is married, said she had met with a male acquaintance who had promised to give her back an old photograph of herself."

"Moreover, the court in October 2006 also sentenced both the woman and man who had been raped to 90 lashes each for what it termed “illegal mingling.”"

This is not adultery, this is just meeting a person of the other gender without her guardian.

> Furthermore the rapists were charged and punished for rape, an act that is illegal.

It is, indeed, illegal, but they were not charged for that: "Despite the prosecution’s requests for the maximum penalty for the rapists, the Qatif court sentenced four of them to between one and five years in prison and between 80 and 1,000 lashes. They were convicted of kidnapping, apparently because prosecutors could not prove rape. The judges reportedly ignored evidence from a mobile phone video in which the attackers recorded the assault."

The scenario we are talking about is a husband repudiating his wife and abandoning her somewhere. Were she to be assaulted by a male, she would then be in an illegal "gender mingling" situation, often punished more harshly than rape. The only thing that is hyperbole in cup's scenario is that she would not be punished for adultery but just for breach of gender isolation.

Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, but if you want to work on Saudi's system, that is all you have, the system is voluntarily opaque and does not communicate statistics on condemnations. Activists and journalists who may try to gather figures risk their freedom.

Women's life in Saudi Arabia is probably the most totalitarian experience available in 2017, on par with North Korea's experience. https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/16/boxed/women-and-saudi-...

Sorry, I meant harry8's scenario, not cup's
So, you mean it's OK to charge a woman for adultery?

Whatever the woman is charged with, it's not right. If she is a rape victim, she should be left alone at the very least, and protected with the rapist prosecuted for the best. Charge her with any crime is a horrible thing to do.

It's close enough. Technically, it works like this:

She claims to be raped. By doing so, she admits that sex occurred outside of marriage, and now she must prove that it was a rape. Sharia requires 4 male witnesses to prove this. Good luck with that.

Unless the rapist was dumb enough to attack while watched by 4 males who would be willing to testify, he can't be convicted. She confessed to the sex though, so she will be convicted.

I was born and raised in Saudia Arabia, left when I was young, I do not know if what you say is true or not, but on ground the reality is very different. Women live a thriving life over there. I can tell you the story of my mom but you wont believe me.
>In sharia/islam, women are the legal property (effectively, not "in legal theory") of their "guardian". When they're married (yes I'm using the passive, they don't get to pick when, where & to whom after all) that becomes their husband. They have full legal authority over them.

You must have got your Ijazah in Fiqh and Usool from Sheikh Google.

> You must have got your Ijazah in Fiqh and Usool from Sheikh Google.

I take it you're muslim ? Why do muslims always lie about the basic properties of islamic law ? Are you ashamed about it ?

I mean basic statements like "islam demands slavery" (another one of those legal classes of people in islam) are obvious and very simple facts, but the rucus online if anybody mentions it is deafening.

If you're trying to claim dogs have more rights in Islam than women or that such a ridiculous comment is a basic property of Islam then there's not much hope for you mate.
Funny thing, we're freely comparing women to dogs itt and even argue that they have less rights. That's how apologists distort the sense of humanity. Try to not hold pr-defensive position and simply open them eyes.
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I see your 30M people and raise you 250M.

Indonesia is headed to Sharia next. Jakarta's governor just got 2 years in prison for blasphemy: arguing the Quran doesn't instruct muslims to not vote for non-muslims.

Yeah, this'll go well.