A judge in the western Saudi Arabia city of Jeddah has passed a sentence of 60 lashes on journalist Rozanna al-Yami because she worked for the Lebanese Broadcast Corporation (LBC), a satellite TV station that shocked conservative Saudis last July by broadcasting an interview with a Saudi man talking openly about his sex life, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported.
The judge dismissed allegations that Yami had directly worked on the offending programme but nonetheless imposed the sentence on the grounds that she was an LBC employee.
“Why the 60 lashes although the judge dropped the charges against Yami?” Paris-based RSF said. “This sentence is utterly unacceptable and archaic, and seems designed more to humiliate a woman than to render justice. Although the case directly concerned her work, she was not tried under the legislation that nowadays governs the media in Saudi Arabia.”
Yami told Agence France-Presse (AFP), “It is a punishment for all journalists through me.” She added that would not appeal because she feared she could end up receiving an even harsher sentence.
It seems the judge punished Yami simply because of her association with the Beirut-based LBC, whose Riyadh and Jeddah bureaux were closed on August 9 on the orders of the culture and information ministry as a result of the previous month’s controversial programme in LBC’s “Red Line” series, in which a Saudi man talked explicitly about his sex life since the age of 14.
Saudi Arabia was ranked 163rd out of 175 countries in the 2009 RSF press freedom index.
