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Saudi Woman Files First Case Against
Religious Police
Agence France-Presse - 13 May, 2007
A Saudi civil court is to hear the first ever
case brought against the kingdom's religious police charged with
enforcing a strict Islamic moral code, the woman plaintiff's lawyer
told AFP on Saturday.
The unnamed woman is seeking
compensation after she and her daughter were allegedly wrongfully
arrested in a shopping centre car park in 2004 for "not wearing
decent clothing," her lawyer Abderrahman al-Lahm said.
Women
in Saudi Arabia must be covered from head to toe when they go out in
public.
The religious policeman in question arrested the
pair, commandeered the car from their driver and drove them to his
headquarters where the already sick mother suffered "health
complications," said Lahm.
The woman's family is bringing the
case before a civil court in Riyadh on Sunday after an Islamic court
rejected the complaint, reportedly ruling that "a member of the
religious police cannot be judged," Lahm said.
He said he
hoped his client's case would help consolidate the role of justice
in defending individual freedoms and human rights.
The case
comes after Al-Watan newspaper last month reported that attacks by
the public against the 5,000-strong Commission for the Promotion of
Virtue and Prevention of Vice were on the rise.
The newspaper
partly attributed differing views over the role of the religious
police, commonly known as Muttawa, to the changes undergone by Saudi
society since the special force was founded several decades
ago.
The interior ministry issued a decree in May 2006 aimed
at reining in the Muttawa by requiring them not to interrogate
detained suspects, as they had previously done, but to hand them
over to the regular police
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