Saudi Arabia's "guardianship" system requires them to seek male permission to travel, work, or leave the house; they also, famously, are not allowed to drive. King Abdullah did receive credit from International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde for his "discreet" improvement of women's lives in the country—more women than men now attend college there, and many have received scholarships to study overseas. But the kingdom's viciousness toward females extends even to the most privileged. Four of King Abdullah's 15 daughters have lived under house arrest for 13 years after publicly opposing the kingdom's policies toward women.
Some 30 women served in the last parliament, and a female deputy speaker was appointed in October 2020. Women secured about 1 percent of the seats in the 2015 municipal council elections. Shiites reportedly hold a small number of Majlis al-Shura seats and many municipal council seats in Shiite-majority areas. The kingdom spends 8% of its GDP on the military , which places it as the world's third biggest military spender behind the United States and China, and the world's largest arms importer from 2015 to 2019, receiving half of all the US arms exports to the Middle East.
According to the BICC, Saudi Arabia is the 28th most militarized country in the world and possesses the second-best military equipment qualitatively in the region, after Israel. By the late 2010s, there have been continual calls for halting of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, mainly due to alleged war crimes in Yemen and especially following the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. But first, it's worth detailing why the American relationship with Saudi Arabia is so problematic. King Abdullah will be replaced by his half-brother, Salman, who has vowed to continue the "correct" policy of his predecessor. For the country's women, religious minorities, and political dissidents, this is bad news. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy in which no opposition to the ruling family is tolerated.
Those brave enough to call for religious pluralism are subject to lengthy prison sentences or state-sponsored violence. Two weeks ago, in a case that aroused international condemnation, the government lashed a Saudi blogger named Raif Badawi 50 times after he dared to defend atheism. Badawi is scheduled to be lashed a total of 950 more times and will serve a 10-year prison sentence for this offense.
Saudi Arabia's sectarian climate has been further reinforced by its military engagement in other countries in the region, notably Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and its long-standing rivalry with Shi'a-majority Iran. Though certain limited reforms have been credited to the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, their scope and effectiveness were constrained by conservative forces within the country. Since his death in January 2015 and the accession of his half-brother King Salman to the throne, there has been little sign of positive progress, with continued repression and restrictions for religious minorities, women and other marginalized groups.
Following recognition in 1931, the United States and Saudi Arabia established full diplomatic relations, with exchange of credentials and the first U.S. ambassadorial posting to Jeddah, in 1940. Saudi Arabia's unique role in the Arab and Islamic worlds, its holding of the world's second largest reserves of oil, and its strategic location all play a role in the long-standing bilateral relationship between the Kingdom and the United States. The United States and Saudi Arabia have a common interest in preserving the stability, security, and prosperity of the Gulf region and consult closely on a wide range of regional and global issues. Saudi Arabia plays an important role in working toward a peaceful and prosperous future for the region and is a strong partner in security and counterterrorism efforts and in military, diplomatic, and financial cooperation. Its forces work closely with U.S. military and law enforcement bodies to safeguard both countries' national security interests.
The United States and Saudi Arabia also enjoy robust cultural and educational ties with some 37,000 Saudi students studying in U.S. colleges and universities and scores of educational and cultural exchange visitors each year. The United States also provides promising youth and emerging Saudi leaders the opportunity to experience the United States and its institutions through the International Visitor Leadership Program and various other exchange programs. The king combines legislative, executive, and judicial functions and royal decrees form the basis of the country's legislation. The king is also the prime minister, and presides over the Council of Ministers of Saudi Arabia and Consultative Assembly of Saudi Arabia.
The family's vast numbers allow it to control most of the kingdom's important posts and to have an involvement and presence at all levels of government. The number of princes is estimated to be at least 7,000, with most power and influence being wielded by the 200 or so male descendants of Ibn Saud. The key ministries are generally reserved for the royal family, as are the 13 regional governorships. The vast wealth generated by oil revenues was beginning to have an even greater impact on Saudi society. It led to rapid technological modernization, urbanization, mass public education, and the creation of new media. This and the presence of increasingly large numbers of foreign workers greatly affected traditional Saudi norms and values.
Although there was a dramatic change in the social and economic life of the country, political power continued to be monopolized by the royal family leading to discontent among many Saudis who began to look for wider participation in government. Meanwhile, the conflict continues to take a heavy toll on Yemeni civilians, making Yemen the world's worst humanitarian crisis. The UN estimates that 131,000 of the estimated 233,000 deaths in Yemen since 2015 are the result of indirect causes like food insecurity and lack of access health services. Nearly twenty-five million Yemenis remain in need of assistance, five million are at risk of famine, and a cholera outbreak has affected over one million people. All sides of the conflict are reported to have violated human rights and international humanitarian law. From 2003 to 2013, "several key services" were privatized—municipal water supply, electricity, telecommunications—and parts of education and health care, traffic control and car accident reporting were also privatized.
In November 2005, Saudi Arabia was approved as a member of the World Trade Organization. Negotiations to join had focused on the degree to which Saudi Arabia is willing to increase market access to foreign goods and in 2000, the government established the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority to encourage foreign direct investment in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia maintains a list of sectors in which foreign investment is prohibited, but the government plans to open some closed sectors such as telecommunications, insurance, and power transmission/distribution over time. The government has also made an attempt at "Saudizing" the economy, replacing foreign workers with Saudi nationals with limited success. Saudi Arabia's absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties. The regime relies on pervasive surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power.
Does Saudi Arabia Have Provinces Women and religious minorities face extensive discrimination in law and in practice. Working conditions for the large expatriate labor force are often exploitative. Protests spread to other cities in the Eastern Province with large Shi'a populations, resulting in similar responses from security forces.
In the aftermath, while channelling more resources into the underdeveloped eastern region of the country, authorities intensified their surveillance of the Shi'a population. Repression of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly intensified. Among those harassed, arbitrarily detained, prosecuted and/or jailed were government critics, women's rights activists, human rights defenders, relatives of activists, journalists, members of the Shi'a minority and online critics of government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Virtually all known Saudi Arabian human rights defenders inside the country were detained or imprisoned at the end of the year. Grossly unfair trials continued before the Specialized Criminal Court and other courts. Courts resorted extensively to the death penalty and people were executed for a wide range of crimes.
Migrant workers were even more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation because of the pandemic, and thousands were arbitrarily detained in dire conditions, leading to an unknown number of deaths. These councils deliberate on the needs of their province, work on the development budget, consider future development plans, and monitor ongoing projects. The governor and deputy governor of each province serve as chairman and vice-chairman of their respective provincial council. As with the Majlis Al-Shura, members of the council participate in committees that focus on various issues of interest to the province.
The councils issue reports that are submitted to the Minister of the Interior, and then passed on to the appropriate government ministries and agencies for consideration. The provincial council system is the result of bylaws established by King Fahd in 1992. These bylaws divided the country into 13 provinces and defined their administrative structure, how they would be administered, and the responsibilities of the governors and other regional officers. In 2005, municipal elections were held for half of the members of each of the 178 municipal councils in the Kingdom. According to The Guardian, as of 2013 there were more than half a million foreign-born domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.
Most have backgrounds in poverty and come from Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. To go to work in Saudi Arabia, they must often pay large sums to recruitment agencies in their home countries. The agencies then handle the necessary legal paperwork.As the Saudi population grows and oil export revenues stagnate, pressure for "Saudization" has grown, and the Saudi government hopes to decrease the number of foreign nationals in the country. Saudi Arabia expelled 800,000 Yemenis in 1990 and 1991 and has built a Saudi–Yemen barrier against an influx of illegal immigrants and against the smuggling of drugs and weapons. In November 2013, Saudi Arabia expelled thousands of illegal Ethiopian residents from the Kingdom.
Various Human Rights entities have criticized Saudi Arabia's handling of the issue. Over 500,000 undocumented migrant workers — mostly from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Yemen — have been detained and deported since 2013. An investigation led by The Sunday Telegraph, exposed the condition of African migrants who were detained in Saudi Arabia allegedly for containing COVID-19 in the kingdom.
Many of the migrants died due to heatstroke or by attempting suicide, after being severely beaten and tortured. Khalid's reign saw economic and social development progress at an extremely rapid rate, transforming the infrastructure and educational system of the country; in foreign policy, close ties with the US were developed. In 1979, two events occurred which greatly concerned the government, and had a long-term influence on Saudi foreign and domestic policy. It was feared that the country's Shi'ite minority in the Eastern Province might rebel under the influence of their Iranian co-religionists. There were several anti-government uprisings in the region such as the 1979 Qatif Uprising. Allegations of torture by police and prison officials are common, and access to prisoners by independent human rights and legal organizations is extremely limited.
In March 2019, international media published leaked prison medical records indicating that a number of political prisoners suffered from cuts, bruises, burns, and malnutrition. Detained women's rights activists were reportedly given electric shocks, whipped, beaten, sexually abused, and threatened with rape. The family of Loujain al-Hathloul stated she had been offered freedom on the condition that she recant her torture allegations, but she refused. The state's oil revenues make up the vast majority of its financial resources, but these are tightly controlled by the royal family, which uses the same income to support itself. In 2018 and 2019, the state oil company, Saudi Aramco, provided more income and expenditure information in preparation for an initial public offering. However, amid ongoing questions about its relationship with the government, the company opted that December to list shares only on a domestic stock exchange, which entailed less transparency than would be required on a major international exchange.
But the effusive reaction to the king's death reveals an uncomfortable truth about Washington's relationship to the kingdom. Despite Riyadh's repulsive human rights record, unproductive role in regional security, and American advances in shale oil production, the United States needs Saudi Arabia more than ever. We condemn the Houthi attacks launched against Saudi Arabia's civil infrastructure earlier today. Unprovoked Houthi attacks against Saudi Aramco's oil storage facilities in Jeddah as well as attacks against civil facilities in Jizan, Najran, and Dhahran are acts of terrorism aimed to prolong the suffering of the Yemeni people.
Today's attacks, just like the attacks against water treatment plants and energy infrastructure on March 19 and 20, were clearly enabled by Iran in violation of UN Security Council resolutions prohibiting the import of weapons into Yemen. Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni Government have endorsed multiple UN calls for ceasefires and de-escalation over the last year. The Houthis continue to reject these calls and respond with terrorist acts and military offensives, all of which extend the Yemen conflict and the consequent humanitarian crisis. It is time to bring this war to a close and relief to the Yemeni people but that can only happen if the Houthis agree to cooperate with the United Nations and its envoy working on a step-by-step process to de-escalate the conflict.
The United States stands fully behind those efforts, and we will continue to fully support our partners in the defense of their territory from Houthi attacks. The government's response to another uprising that occurred in 1979, led by the Islamic radical Juhayman al-Otaybi, was markedly different. Increasing resentment of the government's corruption and close relationship with the US as a betrayal of Islamic principles culminated in an attempted coup towards the end of the year, with hundreds of militants calling for an end to Saudi rule. However, though the uprising itself was suppressed and its leaders executed, King Khaled subsequently took steps to increase rather than diminish the influence of Wahhabi doctrine over the country's political and social life.
This was manifested in almost every aspect of life, including media censorship, cultural restrictions and increased gender segregation. The ensuing years also saw the expansion of religious universities, Islamic centres and the religious police, as well as the entrenchment of extremist perspectives in educational materials and curricula. According to Robert Lacey, now that 'the House of Saud had executed Juhayman … they were making his program government policy'. To this day, freedom of religion is not guaranteed by law in Saudi Arabia and all Saudi citizens are required to follow Islam. Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, adherents of other religions as well as atheists and agnostics, who together number around 2 million people, are forbidden from publicly expressing their beliefs.
However, the situation of religious minorities within Saudi Arabia has recently attracted renewed attention, especially following repeated attacks against Shi'a places of worship. In January 2016, for example, four were killed and 18 wounded in an attack on a Shi'a mosque in Al-Asha region, followed by another attack against a mosque in May 2016 in Dammam that also saw resulted in four deaths. Shortly afterwards, in June, a mosque in the Shi'a-majority province of Watif was attacked by a suicide bomber as part of a series of coordinated attacks across the country.
The Saudi king and crown prince have actively sought to marginalize Islamists, in part by displacing the importance of Islam to the Saudi national narrative and centering the role of the royal family. For example, on Feb. 22, Saudi Arabia celebrated Founding Day for the first time. Saudi unwillingness to raise oil output in response to Biden's request represents the latest sign of shifting loyalties.
Throughout a seven-decade partnership, Washington has acted as Riyadh's main security guarantor, and, in return, most Saudi monarchs coordinated closely with the United States on energy issues. Obesity is a problem among middle and upper-class Saudis who have domestic servants to do traditional work but, until 2018, were forbidden to drive and so are limited in their ability to leave their home. The religious police, known as the mutawa, imposed many restrictions on women in public in Saudi Arabia. The restrictions include forcing women to sit in separate specially designated family sections in restaurants, to wear an abaya and to cover their hair. However, in 2016, the Saudi cabinet has drastically reduced the power of the religious police and barred it "from pursuing, questioning, asking for identification, arresting and detaining anyone suspected of a crime".
In its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2010, Transparency International gave Saudi Arabia a score of 4.7 (on a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 is "highly corrupt" and 10 is "highly clean"). A number of prominent Saudi Arabian princes, government ministers, and businesspeople, including Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, were arrested in Saudi Arabia in November 2017. The government has taken some steps to combat corruption and recover misappropriated assets, but its opaque methods have raised serious concerns about politicization and lack of due process. The crown prince heads an anticorruption committee, which in 2017 ordered the detention of more than 300 people, many of whom were coerced into turning over billions of dollars in assets to the state. Bin Salman's campaign has targeted potential rivals within the royal family, leading observers to suggest these crackdowns are meant to consolidate his political and economic control. Major crackdowns and arrests continued in 2020, with 298 government employees being arrested for corruption in March.
Another 59 were arrested in October, and over $160 million worth of assets were seized. But Hadi handled Yemen's internal politics poorly and, in late 2014, the Houthis–a predominantly Zaydi Shi'a Islamic religious-political-armed movement from northern Yemen– swept into Sana'a and overthrew the Yemeni government. The United States shuttered its embassy in Sana'a and maintained only a small, episodic presence in Aden.
In 2015, Saudi Arabia initiated what has become a disastrous and brutal campaign against the Houthis – a campaign the United States has supported, including by supplying weapons, providing mid-air refueling, and offering targeting assistance. Iran, meanwhile, has provided support to the Houthis, turning Yemen into the site of a proxy war between regional and global adversaries. It is bordered by Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait to the north; by the Persian Gulf, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman to the east; by a portion of Oman to the southeast; by Yemen to the south and southwest; and by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba to the west.
Long-running border disputes were nearly resolved with Yemen and Qatar ; the border with the United Arab Emirates remains undefined. A territory of 2,200 square miles along the gulf coast was shared by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as a neutral zone until 1969, when a political boundary was agreed upon. Each of the two countries administers one-half of the territory, but they equally share oil production in the entire area. The controversy over the Saudi-Iraqi Neutral Zone was legally settled in 1981 by partition, yet conflict between the two countries persisted and prevented final demarcation on the ground. Throughout history, women did not have equal rights to men in the kingdom; the U.S. State Department considers Saudi Arabian government's discrimination against women a "significant problem" in Saudi Arabia and notes that women have few political rights due to the government's discriminatory policies.
The World Economic Forum 2021 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 147th out of 156 countries for gender parity. However, since Mohammed bin Salman was appointed Crown Prince in 2017, a series of social reforms have been witnessed regarding women's rights. Health care in Saudi Arabia is a national health care system in which the government provides free health care services through a number of government agencies. Saudi Arabia has been ranked among the 26 best countries in providing high quality healthcare. The Saudi Ministry of Health is the major government agency entrusted with the provision of preventive, curative, and rehabilitative health care for the Kingdom's population. The Ministry's origins can be traced to 1925, when a number of regional health departments were established, with the first in Makkah, Saudi Arabia.
