Soon thousands were tweeting support, demanding Alqunun, who feared she’d be killed returned to Saudi Arabia, was granted asylum. Among the first to swing into action was Australia’s Human Rights Watch office, which alerted its Thai counterparts and the UN’s Human Rights Council. After Thai journalists began tweeting about Alqunun, Thai officials became less supportive of Saudi pressure to get the fearful young woman on the plane back to Kuwait.
By Jan. 9, the UNHRC had declared Alqunun – who now had more than 100,000 Twitter followers – a refugee, and on Jan. 1 she was granted asylum in Canada. “It’s a great result,” said Human Rights Watch’s Australian director Elaine Pearson. “Had she been forced to go back, we shudder to think what would have happened to her. After she cut her hair, her family locked her up for six months in retaliation.”
Other women who had tried and failed to escape Saudi Arabia have faced a grim fate. In 2017, Dina Ali Lasloom fled her country, but was caught by male relatives at Manila airport in the Philippines and forced onto a plane to Saudi Arabia. She has since disappeared.
“We hear so many terrible reports, but it’s very hard to get statistics about brutality towards women in Saudi Arabia,” Pearson said. “Many female activists, like the women instrumental for pushing for the right to drive, are now behind bars. They were the ones with the most information about women being brutalised and they have been silenced.”
Pearson is heartened by the global response to Rahaf ’s plight. “Her case has served as an inspiration to repressed women across the Arab world.”
International relations expert Dr Kumuda Simpson-Gray, from La Trobe University in Melbourne, says the case, along with the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in the Saudi consul in Turkey, has highlighted the Bin Salman regime’s appalling human rights record.
“Australia and other countries that trade with Saudi Arabia have been shockingly quiet on condemning human rights abuses, in particular the way women are treated,” Simpson-Gray says. “It’s unfortunate it takes a case like this, involving one desperate young woman with an iPhone, to draw attention to what’s happening.”