Well into the 1980s, UNESCO found that fewer than half of Saudi girls between the ages of six and eleven had received any education outside the home. In 2004, Saudi law was changed to allow women to enter degree programs in law. Due to Sharia law, however, a woman's testimony in a court of law, with few exceptions, is worth half of that of a man. Several hundred women hold law degrees and sixty-seven are allowed to practice, based on justice-ministry figures released in November 2015. [1]
Besides limitations on participation in the administration of law, Saudi women are subject to other major restrictions. Marriages are usually arranged and it is very difficult for women to get divorces. In conservative circles, a man is unlikely to see the face of his brother's wife. Institutions and businesses that serve Saudi women are carefully guarded so as to prevent ikhtilat, illegal gender mixing. Restaurants that serve both genders must provide a secluded section, called the "family section." The most innocent head shot of a woman can result in the use of blackmail as a tool; also, people of opposite sexes can't spend time together without risking arrest. [2]
Saudi authorities have a fear of witchcraft, so in 2009, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice created a specially trained unit to conduct witchcraft investigations. Saudi citizens are encouraged to report suspected witches and sorcerers anomalously to a hotline.
Relatively little of Saudi law is written down; judges enjoy considerable freedom of interpretation. Justice is often situational; the law is what a person in a position of power says it is. Heresy is a capital crime in Saudi Arabia. Besides heresy being a capital crime, damaging the reputation of Saudi Arabia or its king can bring the death penalty, as will being convicted of terrorism. An unusually high number of women are put to death,because so many non-violent crimes are subject to the death penalty.
By early November 2015, Saudi Arabia had already carried out more executions -- about 150 -- than it had since 1995. In late November, two Saudi newspapers reported that there had been fifty more recent executions, all based on terrorism convictions.
ADDENDUMS:
*Gun murders in the U.S. are nearly thirty times those in Great Britain.
*An analysis of a dozen military interventions over thirty-five years, up to President Obama's widespread use of assassination by drone strike today, has led Andrew J. Bacevich to conclude that destructive myths about the efficacy of the use of U.S. military power has blinded policy-makers, generals and voters. The use of overwhelming lethal force does not immediately depose dictators, defeat terrorists, or overcome generations of deep-seated sectarian conflicts. [3]
*There is no need to build eighty additional warheads at Oak Ridge in Tennessee to maintain the existing nuclear stockpile. The National Nuclear Security Administration spent about $2 billion, most of it on design of weapons, with no accountability for the waste. A second design is illegally being kept secret.
*The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute released 2015 statistics on global military spending. Such spending reached $1,676 billion (USD), broken down into: U.S.: $596 billion; China: $215 billion; Saudi Arabia: $87.2 billion; and Russia: $66.4 billion. 2015 global military spending averages out to $4.6 billion a day. The U.S. spends 2.77 times as much as China and about nine times as much as Russia on the military.
Footnotes
[1] Katherine Zolpf, "Sisters In Law," The New Yorker, January 11, 2016.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Andrew J. Bacevich, "A Military History," The Albuquerque Journal, July 30, 2016.
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