Saudi Arabia implements end to travel restrictions for Saudi women | Hacker News Reader

Saudi Arabia implements end to travel restrictions for Saudi women

uk.reuters.com

43 pointsthg19 comments

Open articleView on HN

Seeing more of this liberalizations lately, what major gender-rights issues do the Saudis have left to tackle?

They have a few things to work on: http://www.womensmediacenter.com/news-features/saudi-arabia-...

Most of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights_in_Saudi_Arab...

Global Gender Gap Index Rank: 141st out of 149

I'm not of the mind that Saudis are on-par with Sweden. Ultimately was hoping for something a bit more insightful than a Wikipedia article, especially when "Women were previously forbidden from" appears throughout.

Though from Wikipedia, thought this was an oddly discriminatory:

> women are still required to have men swear for them in a court of law.

As black people in the Jim Crow South discovered, "previously forbidden from" and "enjoy genuine equality" are not the same thing.

The Wikipedia article simply serves as a well-sourced starting point.

Saudis are a horrifying dictatorship that murders journalists and oppresses and enslaves people. They are an enemy of human rights.

Cool, I asked about gender-issues specifically. Thanks for derailing.

There are a few that stem from the cultural expectation that the husband's income pays for the whole family, while the wife's income (if she has one) is for her use alone. Therefore, if the wife works outside the home, she is selfish, and not contributing to the family. This leads to discouragement or prohibition of external work and the education required to pursue it, especially higher education.

Divorces tend to asymmetrically favor the husband with respect to child custody and what Anglo-American common law would usually consider joint or common property.

Women's fashion may be limited by modesty laws, and certainly still restricted by social pressures.

Premarital public displays of affection may provoke punishments.

Adultery and rape are still handled in a manner considered improper in the US and Europe.

Homosexuality is still punishable by execution, as far as I know.

Also beheading people and cutting off their hands which are still done in public. Floggings is another.

Also all the Saudi dissidents imprisoned by bone saw such as Raif Badawi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raif_Badawi

Poor guys - it would be sad to live in a country when all young women take a passport and leave for Australia and Canada.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/world/middleeast/saudi-ar...

Glad to see restrictive laws like this get the chop, rather than, say, journalists they don't like.

All it takes is for a religious hardliner to reinterpret the decrees and the Quran for a more restrictive outcome again, right? Usually a literal reading?

{removed per mod request}

Please don't do this here.

That is a fair request, but why is this story allowed? It's clearly off-topic for HN (Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.)

HN had previously articles with a tech angle of using phone apps to track and restrict movement of saudi women. It's nice to keep seeing the evolution of the topic here.

That's a real stretch. You could argue any post on HN is slightly related to tech and there for should be allowed. However, even if that were the case, then comments about Khashoggi should be allowed as well as for it's directly related and was also previously discussed on HN. Obviously that's just playing devils advocate.

The issue wasn't just that you commented on Khashoggi but that you did it in snarky and flamebaity and drive-by way ("in-embassy pick-up"). That breaks a number of the site guidelines, including: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Allowed" is too coarse a term; there are too many variations and details it can't cover.

In this case, the submission has been flagged by users, and it's not one where moderators would turn off the flags. In that sense you can say it's not "allowed".

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