(From the Chronicle Herald Editorials…)

WORLDWIDE outrage has rightly greeted reports that Saudi Arabia’s “justice” system recently sentenced a young woman, gang-raped by seven men, to 200 lashes for being alone with a male friend who was not related to her through blood or marriage.
We stand with and commend the actions of decent people like Nancy Cunningham of Halifax, who has launched a letter-writing campaign in support of the Saudi woman persecuted under her country’s misogynistic, oppressive system.
Sadly, such gender apartheid practices in the Middle Eastern kingdom are nothing new. Under that nation’s arbitrary, discriminatory laws – based on an extreme interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism – women are routinely denied the right to vote, drive, study or work in certain fields and, of course, have their personal freedom to move about often sharply curtailed by the requirement that they be accompanied by appropriate male guardians.
In this case, Saudi justice officials claim that in 2006, the then 19-year-old woman, dressed provocatively, was involved in an adulterous tryst with an unrelated man in a car; she and her partner were then kidnapped by seven men at knifepoint and sexually assaulted. Her assailants received between 10 months and five years for kidnapping. She was sentenced to 90 lashes for being with a man unrelated to her. When she spoke out in the media, denying the allegations, and her lawyer appealed, a vengeful Saudi court suspended the lawyer and upped her penalty to 200 lashes. Her attackers’ sentences were also increased, to between two and nine years.
The international reaction has had some effect. Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal called the ruling a “bad judgment;” the case is to be reviewed by the judiciary. But there’s little doubt such actions come only as a result of widespread condemnation of the sentence, as the case itself reflects the discrimination women and girls face daily in Saudi Arabia.
The greater shame, however, is that it takes such incidents to rouse Western leaders to denounce the ongoing reality of brutal gender apartheid – a term used to describe what’s happening to women in many nations – in Saudi Arabia.
Most of the time, there is only silence, and the sickening spectacle of Saudi Arabia as a member of the UN’s new Human Rights Council, defending its despicable treatment of women in the kingdom as an internal, religious matter.