Global Issues

Global Issues

In this section we will be discussing womens issues from around the World.

Let us first begin with Saudi Arabia where women have been inspired to take to their cars and drive.In many parts of the world women take it for granted that they are allowed to drive cars.

I didn’t realise that in Saudi Arabia a woman can drive but is not allowed to drive. Yes a contradiction here.

Here is some background on the story

On June 17, a group of Saudi women began a nationwide right-to-drive campaign, in which 42 women took to the road. They said their campaign was inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia where street protests toppled authoritarian governments.

Saudi Arabian law does not forbid women from driving, but a religious fatwa dictates that Saudi women must be driven by male drivers or male family members.

The religious police in Saudi Arabia arrested five women Tuesday for driving in defiance of a ban on women getting behind the wheel in the conservative kingdom, according to activists and local media reports.

Saudi Women for Driving, an informal coalition of leading Saudi women’s rights activists, bloggers and academics, said in a statement that the women were arrested in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city.

“If Saudi police think arresting women drivers is going to stop what has already become the largest women’s rights movement in Saudi history, they are sorely mistaken,” the coalition said in a statement released by Change.org, a website where members can create and promote online petitions for social change. “On the contrary, these arrests will encourage more women to get behind the wheel in direct defiance of this ridiculous abuse of our most basic human rights.”

The coalition said the religious police arrested four of the women when they were driving in the Dorat al Arous neighborhood in Jiddah, a port city along the Red Sea. The four, aged 21 to 22 and riding in one car, were taken to a police station, where they signed a pledge not to drive again, the group’s report said. A fifth woman was arrested later Tuesday night when driving in the neighborhood of Suleimaniyah.

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