Rape victim's sentence: 200
lashes
Saudi court ruling sparks rare debate
A Saudi court more than doubled the number of lashes a female rape
victim was sentenced to last year after her lawyer appealed the
original sentence. The decision this week, which many lawyers found
shocking even by Saudi standards of justice, has provoked a rare
public debate about the treatment of women here.
The victim's lawyer, , Abdul Rahman al-Lahem, a well-known
human-rights activist, drew the court's ire because of his strong
public criticism of the handling of the case. He has called his
client's conviction unjust and said the sentences of the seven men
who raped her were too lenient.
He is also known for his past defense of critics of the
monarchy.
The victim's name has not been released. She was raped about 18
months ago in Qatif, a city in the Eastern province, and has become
known in the Saudi media as "the Qatif girl." She was 19 years old
at the time of the assault.
Her case has been widely debated since the court sentenced her to
90 lashes a year ago for being in the same car as an unrelated man,
even after it ruled that she had subsequently been raped. For a
woman to be in seclusion with a man who is not her husband or a
relative is a crime in Saudi Arabia.
Adding to the charged political nature of the case, the victim is a
member of the kingdom's Shiite minority.
The young woman's offense was in meeting a former boyfriend, whom
she had asked to return pictures he had of her because she was
about to marry another man. The couple were sitting in a car when a
group of seven men kidnapped them and raped them both, lawyers in
the case told Arab News, a Saudi newspaper.
The woman and the former boyfriend were originally sentenced to 90
lashes each for being together in private, while the attackers
received sentences ranging from 10 months to 5 years in prison and
80 to 1,000 lashes each.
In its new decision issued Tuesday, the court increased the
victim's sentence to 200 lashes and 6 months in jail. It also
increased the sentences of her attackers to prison terms of 2 to 9
years.
The woman remains free for the time being and has not yet been
lashed.
Lashing is a common sentence under the Saudi penal code. Usually,
lashes are meted out in increments because offenders could not
survive hundreds of lashes at once. The administrator of the
punishment is supposed to hold a Quran under his arm so he cannot
swing the whip too fiercely; lashes are not supposed to leave
permanent scars. The sentence is frequently delivered in public,
often at the entrance to a jail.