Saudi Arabia: Protests to Free Detainees Held Without Trial  · Global Voices
Mona Kareem

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is believed to have thousands of detainees who were not allowed access to trials and many of them do not even know their charges. The families of detainees have been working the past months through social media to spread the word and have finally decided to take their cause to the street. @e3teqal, an account on Twitter, published information about the protest right before it started to avoid a heavy security turnout.
Days before the protests, the account posted this invitation which showed drawings of detainees the way the Palestinian prisoners were symbolized in a late social media campaign:
The account also posted a photograph confirming the participation of the detainees’ children in the protest:
The protest happened in Sahara Mall in the capital Riyadh and another took place in Al-Qasim region. Those are few pictures of the Riyadh protest posted by the same Twitter account mentioned above:
This picture from Al-Qasim protest was posted by @e3teqal too:
Sign reads: Haila Al-Qasir was sentenced to 15 years in jail for calling for justice, is that fair? We stand in solidarity with our brothers in Riyadh; we could not come because our male guardians are in jail.
A few videos of the protests were posted on YouTube by user islamicps07. Here are two of them:
News of arrests was published online soon after the protests.
Also read:
Saudi Arabia: “Release Our Detainees or Put Them on Trial!”