Update | By Martin Michaels
Negotiations between Saudi Arabia and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have successfully led to the inclusion of two Saudi Arabian women in the 2012 London Olympics. This will be the first Olympic games in which Saudi Arabian women will be allowed to participate in the games. Sarah Attar will compete in the 800 meter race and Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani in the judo competition.
Rights groups have praised the decision, noting that this will be the first Olympic games in which every competing country will send both male and female athletes. “It’s an important precedent that will create space for women to get rights, and it will be hard for Saudi hardliners to roll back,” Minky Worden, a representative for Human Rights Watch, said in a recent statement.
(MintPress) – Saudi Arabia has failed to field a single female athlete at this summer’s Olympic games in London. The International Olympic Committee, which oversees the qualification of athletes, says that Saudi Arabia is at risk of not participating in the upcoming games should the conservative kingdom fail to send at least one qualified female athlete. For many, including rights groups in the West, this failure is emblematic of more pressing inequalities in Saudi Arabian society.
The fight for reform
Representatives at the Saudi Arabian embassy in London promised last month to “oversee the participation of women athletes who can qualify for the Games,” before the start of the games on July 27. However, with less than two weeks before the start of the Olympics, no female athletes have qualified for the games.
Many clerics within Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment have denounced women’s participation in sports as promiscuous, “un-Islamic” behaviour. These clerics typically promote the ultra-conservative Salafi and Wahhabi orders of Sunni Islam.
State-run women’s schools are not allowed to teach physical education to women. However, Noura al-Fayez, Saudi Arabia’s only female deputy minister recently wrote to Human Rights Watch saying that there is a plan to integrate physical education into the curriculum of women’s schools.
Other conservative Muslim states, including Qatar and Brunei among others, have successfully fulfilled the International Olympic committee standards by fielding at least one female athlete. Previously, at the 2008 Beijing games, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei were the only three countries to field all male olympic delegations.
Since that time, Qatar and Brunei have made the necessary reforms to ensure that their teams include female athletes.
Women’s rights
The issue elevates concerns about the rights and well-being of women in the conservative kingdom. Rights groups have openly condemned Saudi Arabia’s prohibition on women driving. Additionally, women need permission from their father, husband or a male relative to travel internationally.
The restrictions and punishments, at times, have become quite harsh. In 2011, for example, Saudi Arabia beheaded a woman convicted of “sorcery.” The unidentified woman, reportedly charged clients $800 dollars to receive healing treatments. Rights group Amnesty International openly condemned the execution.
Amnesty’s Interim Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme, Philip Luther, commented on the incident, saying, “The charges of ‘witchcraft and sorcery’ are not defined as crimes in Saudi Arabia and to use them to subject someone to the cruel and extreme penalty of execution is truly appalling.”
Women have made some small but important gains in Saudi Arabia. Last year, for example, women were granted the right to vote in Saudi elections.
However, women remain marginalized in virtually every sector of society. A joint study conducted by Newsweek and The Daily Beast in 2011 corroborates this point, showing Saudi Arabia to have one of the worst women’s rights records worldwide. The survey analyzed a number of measures, including women’s inclusion in politics, the workforce, education and healthcare. Of the 165 countries surveyed, Saudi Arabia was among the countries with the worst record for women’s rights, ranking 147.
Iceland, Sweden and Canada were the top three countries, obtaining near perfect scores in the study. The United States ranked eighth overall.