Women Activists Jailed in Saudi Arabia Are on Hunger Strike To Protest Their Detention
Salma al-Shehab, a mother of two, and seven other Saudi women who are in jail in Saudi Arabia have been on a hunger strike for more than a month to protest their detention. Shehab, a student at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom and the other women began their hunger strike on March 23, the ALQST for Human Rights announced. Shehab received a 34-year jail term and 34-year travel ban in August 2022, for “assisting those who seek to disrupt public order and destabilize civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts,” and by retweeting their tweets; her sentence was later reduced to 27 years in January. She was arrested in January 2021 when she returned to Saudi Arabia for a visit and endured months of interrogation. Her Twitter profile showed she had 2,597 followers and frequently tweeted pictures of her young children. She also sometimes retweeted tweets by Saudi dissidents living in exile, which called for the release of political prisoners in the kingdom, in particular Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain Al-Hathloul, who was released from jail in Saudi Arabia in 2021, after serving three years of a six-year prison sentence for “counterterrorism” for defying a ban on women driving, but remains in the kingdom under a travel ban.
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