In her first official statement, the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States of America, Reema Bandar Al-Saud, said that the cases of Salma Al-Shehab and Noura Al-Qahtani are still under appeal. Even though the two judgments issued by the Specialized Appeals Court and the increased sentence issued by the Court First degree.
The ambassador agreed with the CNN journalist on October 26, 2022, that the sentences that reached 90 years due to tweets are irrational and considered that the system would correct itself, adding that by saying "if necessary."
The European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights confirms that the ambassador’s response shows that the official statements are disconnected from reality. In addition to the fact that the Court of Appeal increased the sentences against both Al-Shehab and Al-Qahtani, the regime that Al Saud claims can reform itself is the one that punishes individuals for expressing their opinion.
Rima said that the reforms in Saudi Arabia are real and that the Kingdom has achieved in 5 years what it has not achieved in 80 years. She also considered that Saudi Arabia today is different from what it was 5 or 10 years ago.
ESOHR believes that the changes that the Saud family is proud of have occurred during the past five years, including the doubling of the number of killings with death sentences, which reached a thousand sentences, including death sentences against children. The escalation against human rights defenders and the extension of their years of imprisonment after the end of their sentences cannot be isolated from the image that the ambassador is talking about her country.
Al Saud said that in recent years, women's rights have been at the fore and that there are ambassadors and representatives of the Saudi government, noting that the most beautiful moment she lived was the moment of lifting the ban on women entering stadiums in the Kingdom. The ambassador’s speech was absent from the fact that the most prominent defenders of women’s rights were imprisoned and sentenced to imprisonment and travel bans and were subjected to various forms of torture, and that the government allocated high diplomatic positions to the women of the ruling family and those close to them, and the ambassador is one of them.
While the House of Saud attributed the lengthy sentences due to the expression of opinion to the fact that reform takes time and that there are things that can be reformed faster than other matters, the European-Saudi Organization believes that human rights cannot be postponed and that any project that does not prioritize it cannot be reform. People's lives and freedom cannot be the price of cosmetic reforms.
ESOHR also stresses that the escalating course of violations in recent years, through arbitrary arrests, prolonged sentences, unjust executions, displacement and crushing of civil society institutions, and the failure to involve the people in oversight, legislation and the policy of impunity, in addition to economic policies that marginalize citizens’ opinion and violate their basic rights, can not be considered positive change and reforms.