| QUOTE (Alepou 340MB @ April 14, 2008 07:16 pm) |
| When in Rome....... |
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| QUOTE |
| Saudi forced annulment victim pleads for mercy TWO years ago, a knock on Fatima and Mansour al-Timani's door shattered the life they had built together. It was the police, delivering news that a judge had annulled their marriage in absentia after some of Fatima's relatives sought the divorce on grounds she had married beneath her. That was just the beginning of an ordeal for a couple who can no longer live together. They sued to reverse the ruling, publicised their story and sought help from a Saudi human rights group. But the two remain apart and Fatima is considering suicide, she said, if her recent appeal to King Abdullah doesn't reunite her with the man she still considers her husband. "Only the king can resolve my case," Fatima said by telephone in a rare interview. "I want to return to my husband, but if that is not possible, I need to know so I can put an end to my life." Fatima's case underscores shortcomings in the kingdom's Islamic legal system — in which rules of evidence are shaky, lawyers are not always present and sentences often depend on the whim of judges. Those rules' most frequent victims are women, who already suffer severe restrictions on daily life in Saudi Arabia: they cannot drive, appear before a judge without a male representative, or travel abroad without a male guardian's permission. Fatima said her husband, a hospital administrator, followed Saudi tradition in asking her father for permission to marry her in 2003. "My brother reported good things about him, so my dad accepted his proposal," said Fatima, a computer specialist who was 29 when she married. A few months after the wedding, several of Fatima's relatives persuaded her father to give them power of attorney to file a lawsuit demanding an annulment, she said. Then her father died, and Fatima said she had hoped the case would be dropped. But on February 25, 2006, police knocked on the couple's door to serve Mansour with divorce papers — which said his marriage had been annulled. Saudi lawyer Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, who used to represent the couple, said local interpretations of Islamic law hold that relatives of a married couple have the right to seek an annulment if they feel the marriage lowers the extended family's status. He said authorities were reluctant to overrule such annulments, believing they are private matters within extended families. Fatima took the couple's two-year-old daughter and four-month-old son to live with her mother, who had persuaded her to let Mansour deal with the legal issues on his own. But after three months without her husband, Fatima and the children sneaked out of her mother's house and flew with Mansour to the western seaside city of Jeddah, where they sought to live in anonymity. Saudi police soon discovered them and imprisoned the family for living together illegally. "The police told me I either return to my (mother's) family or go to jail," Fatima said. "I chose jail." Authorities allowed her to send her daughter back to live with her father, but the infant stayed with Fatima in jail. Meanwhile, Mansour went to court to appeal against the divorce ruling, but a Riyadh appeals court upheld the decision in 2007. Last September, the head of a prominent Saudi human rights group reportedly asked the kingdom's highest court to review the case. Bandar al-Hajjar, head of the National Society of Human Rights, submitted two Islamic studies concluding that the divorce was invalid, according to the Arab News, a Saudi English-language daily. Despite their legal fight, Fatima and Mansour remain apart. After nine months in jail, Fatima moved to an orphanage where she and her son share an apartment with several other women. Fatima said she is holding out hope the king might pardon her, and recognise her as "married to Mansour, before God". "I love him more than ever. He's the only one who has stood by me," she said. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/01/...0764168901.html |
| QUOTE (Kayakiran @ November 16, 2008 11:01 am) |
| http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/domesti...71832.asp?scr=1 I did not know about the four Turks who were beheaded. |
| QUOTE (kvk1 @ November 16, 2008 11:29 am) |
| In 1995, four Turkish citizens were beheaded in Saudi Arabia on charges of drug trafficking, despite strong pressure from Turkey. Bilateral relations were severely damaged by the move and could only be rebuilt after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government came to power in 2002. I hope I can live to see the day these backwards sand monkeys dry up of all their black gold and suffer the exact same way their enslaved people have been suffering for the past few centuries. |
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