Jailed Saudi activist Loujain al-Hathloul 'offered release in return for denying torture on video'

Women's rights campaigner told parents she was held in solitary confinement, beaten, waterboarded, given electric shocks, sexually harassed and threatened with rape and murder

Her brother Walid al-Hathloul said Saudi state security asked his sister to sign on a document and appear on camera denying she had been tortured to secure her release (Reuters)

A leading Saudi women’s rights campaigner has been offered release from prison if she agrees to say she was not tortured in jail, her family have said.

Loujain al-Hathloul, who campaigned to win Saudi women the right to drive, was arrested in May 2018 along with 10 other women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia.

Some of the women appeared in court earlier this year to face charges related to their human rights work and contacts with foreign journalists and diplomats, however the trial has not convened in months.

Her brother Walid al-Hathloul has now said Saudi state security asked his sister to sign a document and appear on camera denying she had been tortured to secure her release.

Mr Hathloul, who lives in Canada, said she agreed to signing a document but refused to appear on camera.

“Our initial agreement was that she will sign the document in which she will deny she had been tortured. And that’s why we remained silent in the past few weeks,” he tweeted. “Asking to appear on a video and to deny the torture doesn’t sound like a realistic demand.”

Her sister Lina, who lives in Brussels, first revealed details of the purported deal in a tweet on Tuesday.

Human rights organisations say at least three of the women, including Ms Hathloul, were held in solitary confinement for months and subjected to abuse including electric shocks, flogging and sexual assault.

Saudi officials have denied torture allegations and said the arrests were made on suspicion of harming Saudi interests and offering support to hostile elements abroad.

Ms Hathloul told her parents she has been held in solitary confinement, beaten, waterboarded, given electric shocks, sexually harassed and threatened with rape and murder.

“They saw that her hands were shaking, they saw the signs of torture – the burns and bruises on her legs,” Mr Hathloul, her brother, told The Independent in March.

“One of the interrogators put his legs on my sister’s legs like you would put your legs on the table. He was smoking and puffing in front of her face,” he said.

In March, Ms Hathloul and some of the other women described in a closed court session the mistreatment they had experienced, sources familiar with the issue said at the time.

Ms Hathloul's siblings allege Saud al-Qahtani, a senior adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who has also been implicated in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was present during some of the torture sessions and threatened to rape and kill her.

The Saudi public prosecutor has said his office investigated the allegations and concluded they were false.

Ms Hathloul, who appeared alongside the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, at the One Young World summit in Ottawa in 2016 for young leaders, peacefully campaigned alongside other activists for years to allow women the right to drive.

The University of British Columbia graduate, who was ranked third in 2015’s list of most powerful Arab women in the world, has been arrested and released several times for defying the driving ban. In 2014, she was detained when she attempted to drive across the border from the United Arab Emirates.

Ms Hathloul served 73 days at a juvenile detention centre as a result and documented many of her experiences on Twitter. She was one of the first women to run for a seat on a municipal council in 2015, but lost.

Saudi Arabia has faced extensive scrutiny and criticism over its human rights record in the wake of Ms Hathloul’s case but also in its role in the ongoing war in Yemen and over the killing of Washington Post columnist Khashoggi in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate last October.

Scores of activists, academics, bloggers and clerics have been arrested separately in the past two years in an apparent attempt to stamp out potential opposition.

Saudi Arabia, in a historic move, recently announced women would finally be allowed to apply for a passport and travel without gaining the consent of a male guardian. The new royal decrees give women the right to register births, marriages and divorces, to be issued official family documents and be guardians to minors.

But campaigners have argued the kingdom’s reforms on women’s rights are radically less extensive than they initially appeared to be and women remain “second-class citizens” in the kingdom.

It has emerged there is a serious lack of clarity over whether women will be able to travel abroad independently. Saudi Arabia’s Centre for International Communications and local media outlets reported the changes will also allow women to leave the country without permission from a male guardian, but the council of ministers’ (the Saudi Arabian cabinet) decision made no mention of changes to that requirement.

Human Rights Watch has urged the Saudi authorities to immediately clarify whether women in Saudi Arabia can leave the country without permission, but they have failed to do so.

Under the kingdom’s restrictive guardianship system, women are deemed legal minors and cannot marry, divorce, travel, get a job, be released from prison or have elective surgery without permission from their male guardians. Often a woman’s male guardian is her father or husband and in some cases a woman’s own son.

Most elements of the guardianship system remain in place despite the newly announced reforms – women still need the permission of a male guardian to get married or divorced, open a business or, sometimes, even to access healthcare.

They also require permission from a male relative to live on their own, as well as leave prison if they have been detained, or exit a domestic abuse shelter. Unlike men, they still cannot pass on citizenship to their children, nor can they provide consent for their children to marry.