Mick Hartley

Another triumph for the Saudi religious police:

A Saudi women's group on Friday blamed the country's religious police in the "honour" killing of two sisters shot dead by their own brother after they were arrested for mixing with unrelated men.

The Society for Defending Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia said the religious police had placed the sisters' lives in danger when they arrested them and then placed them in a Riyadh women's shelter.

The two women, identified as Reem, 21, and Nouf, 19, were murdered after they left the shelter on July 5.

The brother shot them in the presence of their father who, according to newspaper reports, quickly forgave the son for defending the family's honour.

But the society blamed the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or the religious police, for sparking the brother's anger over his family's honour by arresting the girls in the first place.

"The hands of the religious police, as well as the brother's hands, are stained with the blood of these innocent young women," the group said in a statement.

"These women have not committed any crime to be killed in a such brutal way."
Under Saudi Arabia's Islamic sharia legal code, unrelated men and women are not allowed to mix together, and the religious police actively enforce the rules by patrolling areas frequented by young people.

Saudi officials continue to require women to obtain permission from male guardians to conduct their most basic affairs, like traveling or receiving medical care, despite government assertions that no such requirements exist, Human Rights Watch said today. The government made its assertions most recently in June 2009, to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Wajeha al-Huwaider picked up her passport, got in a taxi, and headed from her home in eastern Saudi Arabia to the nearby island kingdom of Bahrain — a 45-minute drive that many Saudis take to get away for the weekend.

Despite having a valid passport, Saudi authorities at the border sent al-Huwaider home. That's because in Saudi Arabia, a woman needs permission from her male guardian before she can leave the country.

Al-Huwaider — a vocal women's rights activist in Saudi Arabia — knew before she left that she would be turned away at the border. Her attempted trip was simply to make a point about the Saudi guardianship system that she says "controls all aspects of women's lives."

"Either you treat us like mature citizens or let us leave the country (permanently)," she told CNN.

She's urging all Saudi women who are tired of "being oppressed" to go "to any border and try to cross it without permission from their male relative."

She wants to end Saudi Arabia's strict guardianship laws in which women must get permission from their husband, father, or closest male relative before doing the most mundane of tasks — including working outside the home, going to school, maintaining a bank account, or leaving the country for a weekend getaway.