Loujain
al-Hathloul
Saudi women's rights defender held in detention from May 2018 to February 2021 and now under an indefinite travel ban.
- Country
- Saudi Arabia
- Arrested
- 15 May 2018
- Sentence
- 5 years 8 months (Specialised Criminal Court, 28 Dec 2020), with 2 years 10 months suspended and time served credited; 3 years of probation; travel ban, which continued after its court term ended.
- Status
- At liberty
- Arrested
- 15 May 2018
- Sentence
- 5 years 8 months (Specialised Criminal Court, 28 Dec 2020), with 2 years 10 months suspended and time served credited; 3 years of probation; travel ban, which continued after its court term ended.
- Judicial status
- Convicted, final
- Restrictions
- Travel ban
- Name in Arabic
- لجين الهذلول
- Charges
- Communicating with foreign embassies and journalists
- Applying for jobs at the UN
- Promoting women's rights in violation of "public order"
The arrest, and what followed.
Background and work
Loujain al-Hathloul is one of Saudi Arabia's most prominent women's-rights defenders. She rose to international visibility through her campaigning against the kingdom's ban on women driving and her sustained advocacy for the abolition of the male-guardianship system that subordinated adult women to male relatives across nearly every dimension of public life.
Arrest and detention
She had been detained before: for 73 days from December 2014 after trying to drive into Saudi Arabia from the UAE, for a few days in June 2017 at Dammam airport, and in March 2018, when she was seized in Abu Dhabi, returned to Saudi Arabia and placed under a travel ban.
On 15 May 2018, at her home in Riyadh and weeks before the driving ban was officially lifted, Saudi authorities arrested al-Hathloul along with a cohort of women's-rights advocates in a sweep widely interpreted as a deliberate signal that activism, not reform, would not be tolerated. She spent nearly three years in detention, held incommunicado for the first three months. During pre-trial detention she reported being tortured, sexually harassed, and held in solitary confinement.
Conviction and release
On 28 December 2020 the Specialised Criminal Court sentenced her to five years and eight months in prison under counter-terrorism legislation, with two years and ten months suspended. She was conditionally released on 10 February 2021, on three years of probation and under a court-ordered travel ban. On 10 March 2021 the appeal court upheld the verdict.
Post-release: an indefinite travel ban
The court-imposed travel ban officially expired on 13 November 2023. In February 2024, when al-Hathloul attempted to leave Saudi Arabia, border officials informed her she remained under a permanent travel ban with no expiry date, in violation of Saudi law and the kingdom's international obligations under the ICCPR. In May 2024 rights groups said she remained in Saudi Arabia, unable to travel, and that her parents were also barred from travelling.
-
Detained together
Samar Badawi
“Both were detained in the crackdown on women human rights defenders that began in May 2018; Badawi was arrested on 30 July 2018.”
-
Named in this file
Ziad Al-Sufyani
“Later he became an administrator on Arabic Wikipedia, where he spent hours creating and editing entries, including the page for Loujain Al-Hathloul, the women's rights activist whose own name had become a battleground in…”