Efforts to save , an Egyptian wedding planner in Saudi Arabia, from harsh punishment are not succeeding, writes Doaa El-Bey "This is a very harsh punishment for a business dispute. I have asked all the men of religion, who all say the same thing. Five-hundred lashes in this case are very cruel," Hafez Abu Seada, secretary-general of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), told Al-Ahram Weekly in a phone interview on the case of , an Egyptian citizen caught up in a legal dispute in Saudi Arabia. Abu Seada added that the Wafa case represented a clear violation of standards of human rights. The investigation, trial and sentence she received were unfair, and she was denied her right to a proper defence, he said. This week the Association of Families of Egyptians detained in Saudi Arabia, a pressure group, also held a press conference at the Press Syndicate in Cairo in order to call for the release of Egyptian nationals detained in Saudi Arabia without trial. The association was founded one year ago by the families of some 36 Egyptian nationals detained without trial in the kingdom. Meanwhile, the EOHR has petitioned the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, at the United Nations Office at Geneva, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, to work for the immediate release of Wafa and the halting of her punishment. The EOHR has called on Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi to work towards the immediate release of Wafa and the end of the punishment against her. Egypt's National Council for Women has sent a letter to the Saudi ambassador in Cairo demanding Wafa's release and urging the Saudi authorities to halt Wafa's sentence. In an online statement issued last week, the EOHR said that starting from May this year, Wafa had been subjected to 50 lashes per week from her 500-lash punishment. She faces 200 more lashes, despite having suffered from distortion to her spine. Although Wafa, a mother of twins, has been detained since 2009, her case was not widely reported in the media. Abu Seada ascribed this to her family's avoiding speaking to the media following threats if the case was reported. However, the case came to light after Essam El-Erian, vice chair of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, called for her freedom last month. On his Twitter account, El-Erian wrote that "the [Egyptian] Foreign Ministry is still silent about , who is imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. Why doesn't the kingdom announce the truth of the case so that such regrettable mishaps do not recur?" So far, there have been no official statements on the case from Saudi Arabia. Abu Seada said that his organisation had taken the case to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry and the Egyptian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Mahmoud Ouf, who had said that he would do his best to intervene to prevent the flogging. However, the ambassador had later said that the flogging was a Saudi procedural matter, according to Abu Seada, indicating that he implicitly accepted the punishment. The Foreign Ministry stated that the Egyptian ambassador to Saudi Arabia had written to Saudi Interior Minister Ahmed bin Abdel-Aziz asking for his intervention to halt the flogging of Wafa. "The Egyptian consulate in Riyadh has been following Wafa's case from the beginning. The consulate's legal consultant has met Wafa at various times and attended her trial sessions. A Saudi lawyer was assigned to her at her request," ministry spokesman Amr Roshdi declared last week. He said that all necessary legal support had been provided to Wafa as an Egyptian citizen. Wafa had been accused by a female member of the Saudi royal family of cashing a cheque that was intended as a downpayment for establishing a restaurant in Saudi Arabia, but of not following through on her contractual responsibilities. Her family has disputed the charge, saying that she wasn't even accused of fraud until she had been held in prison for several months. The family managed to reach former president Hosni Mubarak before his toppling in last year's revolution, sending him details of Wafa's plight. However, they received no reply. At Wafa's trial she was denied access to a lawyer. She was then sentenced in June 2011 to five years in prison and 500 lashes. She has received 300 of these thus far. Some two million Egyptian expatriates currently live and work in Saudi Arabia. Egyptian human-rights activists and some expatriates have repeatedly accused Saudi Arabian officials of mistreating Egyptian nationals working there. There are tens of Egyptians detained in Saudi Arabia without trial. Diplomatic negotiations have succeeded in releasing some of them, but many are still detained. In April, Cairo and Riyadh fell out when hundreds of Egyptians protested outside the kingdom's embassy in Cairo, demanding the release of Egyptian lawyer Ahmed El-Gizawi, who was arrested on drug charges while travelling to Saudi Arabia to perform the lesser pilgrimage (omra). The protests, which openly criticised the Saudi king, caused the Saudis to recall their ambassador and shut the embassy. The embassy was reopened some days later.
