(CPJ/IFEX) – In a 14 October 2003 letter to Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, CPJ condemned the government’s harassment of Wajeha al-Huwaider, a writer for the Arabic-language daily “Al-Watan” and the English-language daily “Arab News”. CPJ sources confirmed that the Information Ministry issued directives in late August effectively barring al-Huwaider from publishing her […]
(CPJ/IFEX) – In a 14 October 2003 letter to Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, CPJ condemned the government’s harassment of Wajeha al-Huwaider, a writer for the Arabic-language daily “Al-Watan” and the English-language daily “Arab News”.
CPJ sources confirmed that the Information Ministry issued directives in late August effectively barring al-Huwaider from publishing her work in “Al-Watan” and “Arab News”. This action comes in response to a column that al-Huwaider published in late May that discussed some Saudi citizens’ disillusionment with their country and the peoples’ tendency to look to the United States for solutions to problems.
Al-Huwaider is the latest of a number of journalists whom the government has barred from writing. In July, the Information Ministry banned Saudi writer Hussein Shobokshi from writing his weekly column in the newspaper “Okaz”, apparently because of an editorial that Shobokshi authored about such sensitive topics as the rights of women to drive and of citizens to vote (see IFEX alert of 31 July 2003).
Two months earlier, the government had removed “Al Watan” editor Jamal Khashoggi from his post because of the paper’s provocative editorial stance against Islamic militancy in Saudi Arabia in the wake of the 12 May suicide bombings in the capital, Riyadh, which killed more than two dozen people (see alerts of 18 June and 30 May 2003).
In 2002, CPJ documented a number of other examples of editors and journalists who were forced to resign from their positions due to government pressure. CPJ has recently received multiple unconfirmed reports of other new cases.
