genderberg.com

Saudi Arabia's religious police plan to behead a woman accused of being a witch, a human rights group said yesterday.

Human Rights Watch has asked the country's king to intervene over "absurd charges that have no basis in law".

Fawza Falih was arrested and interrogated in the northern town of Quraiyat two years ago and was sentenced to death.

The judges who convicted her relied on her forced confession and the statements of witnesses who said she had "bewitched" them.

One man claimed that he became impotent after Falih cast a spell on him.

Witchcraft is considered an offence against Islam in the conservative kingdom.

Falih retracted her confession in court, saying it was extracted under duress and that she could not understand the document because she is illiterate.

The death sentence was lifted on appeal, but reimposed in the name of "public interest" shortly afterwards.

Joe Stork, the Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said: "The fact that Saudi judges still conduct trials for unprovable crimes like 'witchcraft' underscores their inability to carry out objective criminal investigations.

"Fawza Falih's case is an example of how the authorities failed to comply even with existing safeguards in the Saudi justice system."

Saudi Arabia does not have a written penal code, although a law imposed in 2002 supposedly grants defendants the right to be tried in person and to have a lawyer present during interrogation and trial.

But this is often ignored and sentences can depend on the whim of judges.

The most frequent victims of whimsical rulings are women, who already suffer severe restrictions in their daily life.

Last year, a woman was sentenced to a public lashing after being gang-raped by five men who found her in a car with a man who was not related to her - a crime in itself.

The sentence was lifted after an international outcry.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a ... ge_id=1811

This is outrageous! I hate patriarchal religions. I thought the witch-hunt was over!

Last year, a woman was sentenced to a public lashing after being gang-raped by five men who found her in a car with a man who was not related to her - a crime in itself.

How dreadful!

If this was happening to males, you can be sure the army would be putting their boots on.

The west would certainly take it a lot more seriously if it was men that were affected. Although I'm sure the silence here also has something to do with the fact that Saudi Arabia's a top US ally and there's a lot of money to be made from the oil industry. When Afghanistan was concerned Bush seemed happy to talk about improving women's rights when justifying the invasion but as we've seen it was all a lie both because he doesn't give a damn about women's rights when it doesn't serve his own interests and also because not much seems to have changed in Afghanistan since the US occupation - just a few weeks ago a man was sentenced to death there for downloading feminist literature on the internet. In Iraq things have actually got a lot worse with fundamentalists now slaughtering women who refuse to wear the veil as well as anyone else who doesn't fit in with their warped and medieval ideas about how the world should be.

But we as individual males dont do enough, sometimes don't even care.