Saudi Arabia Orders Women Segregated From Men in Council Meetings Ruling deals setback to women’s rights after recent municipal elections Margherita Stancati and Ahmed Al Omran
http://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-orders-women-segregated-from-men-in-council-meetings-1454522211
Saudi Arabia has ordered the segregation of men and women in local council meetings, in a setback to women’s rights in the ultraconservative kingdom.
Under the new rules, which follow the recent election of women to Saudi Arabia’s local councils, female representatives must now participate in the council meetings through a video link. The men will be able to hear their female colleagues, but not see them.
Females represent a fraction of the council members—38 out of 2,106 officials—but the same-room ban is a reminder of the challenges women face in Saudi Arabia, where they still can’t drive or travel abroad without the permission of a male relative.
The government order represents a particularly strict imposition of the country’s widely applied gender segregation policy. It is in contrast with the Shura Council, an unelected advisory body to the king, where women and men sit in the same assembly hall.
The elections in December were widely hailed at the time as a small but symbolic turning point for women’s rights in the kingdom. Yet the ruling underscores the continued sway of the country’s hard-line conservatives.
Conservative clerics protested against women’s participation before the election over concerns that it would lead to gender mixing and Westernization of society.
Sheikh Abdulrahman al-Barrak said in a fatwa last August that it was “forbidden for women to participate in the municipal councils elections, elected or appointed, and it is forbidden for everyone to elect them.”
Still, female candidates did better than expected in the Dec. 12 nationwide municipal election, winning 21 out of 979 elected seats. The local councils are the only elected bodies in the country, and this was the first time women were allowed to participate as both voters and candidates.
The inclusion of women in the vote was announced by the country’s late monarch, King Abdullah, who also appointed women in the Shura Council for the first time in 2013.
Both female and male members of the Shura have spoken out against the segregation in the municipal councils.
Thuraya al-Arrayed, a member of the Shura, said the new regulation for the local councils goes against the precedent set by King Abdullah, who allowed women and men to sit in Shura Council together.
Ms. al-Arrayed said “somebody just didn’t do his homework” when the decision was made to separate the women from the men in the municipal councils.
“A decision from a much higher level was made when we were appointed to the Shura Council,” she said. “We are in the same hall. We aren’t separated behind a glass wall or in a separate room. It is full membership with full participation.”
The Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The regulation followed heated discussions in the first meeting of the local council of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city. At the first meeting, the two women council members refused to sit behind a partition wall and insisted on being at the same table as the men, triggering a quarrel with the hard-liners among them, according to people familiar with the matter.
Jeddah has the reputation of being less conservative than the capital, Riyadh, with women taking pride in their multicolored abayas, the all-covering gowns that Saudi women mostly wear in black. Hard-liners and moderates are more likely to clash there than elsewhere.
The two women who were elected in the coastal city are Rasha Hefzi, a well-known social worker, and Lama al-Sulaiman, a prominent businesswoman who previously served as the deputy head of Jeddah’s Chamber of Commerce.
“Every step toward having more women participating in society—through economic, political or social ways—is important,” Ms. al-Sulaiman said on the day she was elected. “The more women are there, the more you know that there is a full representation of the people of Saudi Arabia.”
In response to the same-room ban, a person close to Ms. al-Sulaiman said she considered quitting from public office in protest. Neither Ms. al-Sulaiman nor Ms. Hefzi responded to requests to comment.
It is unclear whether they or other female council members will appeal to change the new rules.
“Honestly, we aren’t sure we are going to challenge it. There are issues with higher priorities. We have a responsibility toward voters,” says Eihab Hassan Nassier, an associate of Ms. Hefzi. “It is something we are putting behind us.”
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