Saudi Fifa sponsorship saga highlights the need for human rights reform

Anna Cusack is advocacy and policy manager at Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand.

OPINION: Aotearoa New Zealand has shown that it won’t tolerate sportswashing. Now we must stand up for human rights in Saudi Arabia.

The reported Saudi sponsorship of this year’s Fifa Women’s World Cup in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia has captured headlines lately. Athletes, officials, and thousands of New Zealanders have spoken out about their concerns for this deal. I believe it’s extremely problematic for a government that pervasively oppresses women to be sponsoring one of the world’s foremost women’s sporting events.

Over the past few weeks, this pressure has built to the point where it seems that the sponsorship agreement may be “reshaped” by Fifa. But let’s not take our eye off the ball. The Saudi authorities are still perpetrating horrendous human rights abuses and there’s more we can do to help the Saudi women who are bravely standing up for their rights.

READ MORE:
* Fifa poised to scrap Visit Saudi sponsorship for Women’s World Cup
* US star Alex Morgan calls proposed Saudi World Cup sponsorship deal ‘bizarre’
* ‘I know what these women stand for’: Matildas could protest Visit Saudi deal

In 2019, an official announcement by Saudi Arabia’s state security agency categorised feminism as an “extremist idea”, punishable by jail and flogging.

While Saudi officials quickly walked back from this statement, human rights activists were deeply concerned about the implications for women rights.

Fast forward to International Women’s Day in 2022, when Saudi Arabia passed a law that codified many of the problematic practices inherent in the country’s male guardianship system.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman framed the new law as a step towards progress and gender equality. In reality, the law entrenched a system of gender-based discrimination in most aspects of family life, including marriage, divorce and child custody.

The male guardianship system is profoundly unjust: it restricts women’s ability to exercise their rights and grants men wider powers over their children. Women in Saudi Arabia are still subject to the discretionary attitudes of men, and the new law further entrenched this.

In Saudi Arabia today, human rights activists face harassment, smear campaigns, surveillance, arbitrary detention, torture, and enforced disappearances. Last year, Amnesty International documented the cases of 15 people who were sentenced to prison terms of up to 45 years simply for peaceful online activities.

One of those people is Salma Al-Shehab, a PhD student and mother of two. Salma was doing her postgraduate studies in the UK when she returned home to Saudi Arabia for a holiday.

There, she was arrested for using social media to support women’s rights advocates. She was sentenced to 34 years in prison after a grossly unfair trial. The charges against her included publishing tweets “that disrupt the public order”. It is the longest known prison sentence handed down against a Saudi woman for peaceful online expression, signalling an alarming deterioration of the human rights situation in the country.

For years, the Saudi authorities have arrested, imprisoned and sentenced Saudi women’s rights activists who campaigned for the end of the male guardianship system. Even those released after several years of imprisonment face travel bans and restrictions on their freedom of expression.

Meanwhile, Saudi authorities continue to execute people for a wide range of alleged offences. On a single day last year, 81 people were put to death, many of whom were tried in deeply unjust trials.

The Fifa Women’s World Cup is an historic moment for women’s sports in Aotearoa New Zealand. The news that Visit Saudi may be signed up as a sponsor has grossly undermined what ought to be a celebration of women’s rights and sporting achievements around the world. Fifa must come clean about this latest sportswashing scandal. But the international community can’t forget about Saudi women and girls when the tournament kicks off.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, we must speak out against the Saudi Government’s human rights abuses and call for much needed reforms. The New Zealand Government should be raising these concerns through all possible diplomatic channels and in public. So far, we have not seen enough of this.

Now is the time to show meaningful commitment to defending human rights in Saudi Arabia. Fifa has inadvertently given us all an opportunity to hold the Saudi Government accountable for their actions: we must take the ball and run with it.