{"id":174745,"date":"2018-08-03T01:21:34","date_gmt":"2018-08-03T05:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=174745"},"modified":"2018-08-03T01:21:34","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T05:21:34","slug":"raif-badawis-sister-arrested-saudi-arabia-amnesty-international","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/08\/03\/raif-badawis-sister-arrested-saudi-arabia-amnesty-international\/","title":{"rendered":"Raif Badawi’s sister arrested in Saudi Arabia: Amnesty International"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
File Photo: Badawi’s brother Raif was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and later sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in jail for criticizing clerics. (Photo<\/a> By Ensaf Haidar – Picture provided by PEN International\/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

MONTREAL \u2014 The sister of jailed blogger Raif Badawi has been arrested in Saudi Arabia, according to Amnesty International.<\/p>\n

The human rights organization said Samar Badawi was detained earlier this week along with Nassima al-Sada, another prominent female activist.<\/p>\n

Amnesty’s Middle East research director described the arrests as part of a larger crackdown on human rights in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese brave women represented the last vestiges of the human rights community in the country, and now they too have been detained,\u201d Lynn Maalouf said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Amnesty says Badawi has been repeatedly targeted by the Saudi government for her work as a human rights activist.<\/p>\n

She was previously arrested in 2016 and subject to a travel ban in 2014.<\/p>\n

Jackie Hansen, a gender rights campaigner for Amnesty International\u00a0Canada, said the circumstances of the arrests are still unclear and there’s no news of any charges.<\/p>\n

She said it is unlikely there was one event that led to the arrests.<\/p>\n

Rather, she believes it was part of a roundup of women’s rights activists that began earlier this year, shortly before the government lifted a ban on women driving.<\/p>\n

\u201c(The jailed women) have done nothing wrong,\u201d she said in a phone interview Thursday. \u201cThey have broken no international laws. They have peacefully advocated for justice and equality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Badawi’s brother Raif was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and later sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in jail for criticizing clerics.<\/p>\n

He received 50 lashes in January 2015 during a public flogging but is not believed to have received any more corporal punishment since then.<\/p>\n

His wife and three children live in Quebec and became Canadian citizens last month.<\/p>\n

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said on social media Thursday she was \u201calarmed\u201d to hear of Samar Badawi’s arrest.<\/p>\n

\u201cCanada\u00a0stands together with the Badawi family in this difficult time, and we continue to strongly call for the release of both Raif and Samar Badawi,\u201d she wrote on Twitter.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MONTREAL \u2014 The sister of jailed blogger Raif Badawi has been arrested in Saudi Arabia, according to Amnesty International. The …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":174748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news-ca","category-news","mauthors-morgan-lowrie","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}