RIYADH (Middle East Eye) – Two members of the Howeitat, a tribe in Saudi Arabia forcibly displaced to make way for the $500bn Neom megacity, have received lengthy sentences over their protests against the project, a UK-based rights group has reported.
Abdulilah al-Howeiti and his relative, Abdullah Dukhail al-Howeiti, were both handed a 50-year prison term and 50-year travel ban for supporting their family’s refusal to be forcibly evicted from their homes in the Tabuk province of northwestern Saudi Arabia, according to Alqst.
The rulings in their cases, made by the Specialized Criminal Court of Appeal in August, come among a raft of similarly long sentences handed down by Saudi courts this summer.
Two women - Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University student and mother of two, and Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani, a mother of five - were given 34 years and 45 years respectively over tweets critical of the Saudi government. Osama Khaled, a writer, translator and computer programmer, was sentenced to 32 years over “allegations relating to the right of free speech”, Alqst said last week.
Unverified reports have suggested a Saudi court also recently sentenced a third member of the Howeitat to a lengthy sentence.
“The lengthy prison sentence handed [out] against members of the Howeitat tribe follow a dangerous pattern we are seeing unfold in Saudi Arabia,” Ramzi Kaiss, legal and policy officer at MENA Rights Group, told Middle East Eye.
Kaiss said that since U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in July, there had been a “more repressive approach by the Saudi state security and judicial authorities against individuals exercising their right to freedom of speech”.
Lina al-Hathloul, Alqst’s head of monitoring and communications, said: “This is becoming a new trend. No one will be saved from this. I think that anyone who gets arrested now will be handed a lengthy sentence.”
Plans for Neom were first announced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017, when he promised a futuristic city would be built on Saudi Arabia’s northwest coast. So far, little has been constructed, but large sums have been paid to consultants and increasingly outlandish plans revealed. Yet Saudi authorities have sought to clear areas along 170km of Tabuk province of its residents, many of whom belong to the Howeitat tribe.