South African sisters at UN detail 'torturous' Saudi detention

Yumna Desai, a former English teacher at the University of Ha’il in northern Saudi Arabia and her sister Huda Mohammad, who had been married to a Saudi national and has a daughter with Saudi citizenship, were both imprisoned for a total of four years between them.

Desai was told she was charged with unspecified “cyber crimes” after a year and half following her arrest, while her sister has yet to identify her charge.

“We were never given an explanation as to why we were arrested,” Desai said, during her testimony on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council.

“Detainees are left for unknown periods in solitary confinement. They are threatened with arrests and detentions of family members if they did not confess.”

Desai said she had seen children held with their mothers, and four women giving birth in custody.

“I stand here today to give a voice to the voiceless, those detainees who have been physically and psychologically tortured, sitting there for years without trial, denied visits, phone calls, medical aid,” she said.

More than a dozen women activists were arrested by Saudi authorities in May last year, in a sweeping crackdown on campaigners - just before the historic lifting of a decades-long ban on women drivers the following month.

Read more: Saudi women activists should be honoured, not imprisoned

Many of them were accused of undermining security and aiding enemies of the state and faced caning, electrocution and sexual assault in imprison, rights groups and their family members say.

Desai said she seen some leading female women’s rights campaigners in prison and urged the international community to rally for all of their release, not just those who have hit the headlines.

“It is not just people like Loujain al-Hathloul, Aziza al-Yousef or Samar Badawi, all of them who were in the same prison wing as me, that we should feel outraged about.

“It was entirely arbitrary and illegal, not just my case but for the rest of the girls.

“Our arrest, like of many in the country, was violent and to this day remains a mystery," she added.

“Today we have submitted an official complaint on Saudi treatment to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.”

Despite the piling evidence, the Saudi government has denied allegations of abuse and has drawn sharp criticism from rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the UN.

"These women's rights activists should be released from detention for their peaceful activism not referred to trial," said Amnesty's Samah Hadid, the organisation's Middle East campaigns director.

Three dozen countries, including all 28 EU members, have previously called on Riyadh to release the activists, the first rebuke of the kingdom at the UN Human Rights Council since it was set up in 2006.

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