The WTA finals host revealed its commitment to women’s rights by jailing a female activist
Manahel al-Otaibi, 29, pictured in 2019 in a Riyadh mall, has been jailed by Saudi Arabia for 11 years for offences including wearing ‘indecent clothes’.Manahel al-Otaibi, 29, pictured in 2019 in a Riyadh mall, has been jailed by Saudi Arabia for 11 years for offences including wearing ‘indecent clothes’.
After the WTA deal was signed, in April, Navratilova commented, it was “about as big a change as you can make except for maybe going to North Korea”. Which is definitely something for the WTA to consider when the three-year Saudi deal comes up for renewal. Why not? None of the main criteria the WTA applied to the Saudi proposal featured human rights.
In practice, as human rights organisations explain, the tennis deal is designed to obscure not alleviate the oppression of Saudi women living under male guardianship law. This,, “sets out the order of who can act as a woman’s male guardian, starting with her father, then moving along the patriarchal line to her grandfather, brother, uncles, male cousins, and finally, a male judge to decide who she can marry.”But already the BBC can be seen getting behind a more progressive fiction.
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