Saudi’s sweeping anti-cyber crime law crushes public conversation
On July 4, 2021, Nourah al-Qahtani, a Saudi mother writing from her anonymous Twitter account, @Najma097, tweeted out a statement in support of a friend whose Twitter handle had been deactivated. “Our brother Saheeb lost his old account,” she wrote. “Please follow and support his new one.” Later that day, al-Qahtani was arrested and charged with “using the Internet to tear the [country's] social fabric." She now faces 45 years in prison.
The only reply, to her tweet calling for support for her friend, was written 23 days later. The writer of the message seemed unsurprised by the mother of five’s sudden silence: “And where have you disappeared to?”
Al-Qahtani’s sentence was handed down in the same month as another Saudi woman, Salma al-Shehab, was sentenced to 34 years in prison. Both were peaceful protesters, charged and convicted under the country’s draconian Anti-Cyber Crime and Counter-Terrorism laws. Enacted in 2007 and 2014 respectively, these laws were designed to be both broad and vague, enabling the government to arrest anyone for seemingly any cause it deemed fit. According to estimates from 2017, at least 25 different activists in Saudi have been arrested since 2011—many serving a minimum of at least ten years in prison. The language within these laws enables the court to label any criticism a terrorist act. Article 6 of the Saudi Anti-Cyber Crime law, for example, can be used to charge an individual for the “production of material impinging on public order, religious values, public morals, or privacy.” All that with no specific mention on how that impingement is defined, or what those public values are.
“If you read the law, you’ll find that it’s perfect,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, a Saudi Arabian research director with Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). “You can basically fit anything to it.”