The US on Wednesday called the case of an eight-year-old Saudi girl married to a man 50 years older a “clear and unacceptable violation of human rights,” in a rare criticism of its oil-producing ally.
US State Department spokesman Robert Wood said the US had frequently raised the issue of child marriages with Saudi officials, although he could not say whether this specific case had been raised.
A court in the town of Unaiza in Saudi Arabia upheld for the second time last week the marriage of the Saudi girl to a man who is about 50 years her senior on condition he does not have sex with her until she reaches puberty.
“Child marriage is a clear and unacceptable violation of human rights in our view,” Wood told reporters in Washington. “US officials at all levels frequently raise with the Saudi government our human rights concerns, especially those dealing with ... children and child marriages.”
On Tuesday, the Saudi Justice Minister Mohammed al-Issa was quoted as saying Riyadh would regulate the marriages of young girls after the court refused to nullify the eight-year-old’s marriage.
Saudi Arabia is a patriarchal society that applies an austere form of Sunni Islam that bans unrelated men and women from mixing and gives fathers the right to wed their sons and daughters to whomever they deem fit.
The Justice Ministry aims “to put an end to arbitrariness by parents and guardians in marrying off minor girls,” al-Issa told al-Watan newspaper, partially owned by members of the royal family.
The comments suggested the practice of marrying off young girls would not be abolished.
The regulations would seek to “preserve the rights, fending off blights to end the negative aspects of underage girls’ marriage,” he said.
Many young girls in Arab countries that observe tribal traditions are married to older husbands, but not before puberty. Such marriages are also driven by poverty in countries like Yemen.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
STILL IN POWER: US intelligence reports showed that the Iranian regime is not in danger of collapse and retains control of the public, casting doubt on Trump’s exit Nearly every US Senate Democrat on Wednesday signed a letter sent to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requesting a “swift investigation” of airstrikes on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children and any other potential US military actions causing civilian harm. Reuters reported on Thursday last week that US military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the Feb. 28 strike on the school, as US and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran. “The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages
RSS