Two South African sisters who were imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, initially without charge, has taken their complaint to the United Nations.
Yumna Desai, a former English teacher at the University of Ha’il in northern Saudi Arabia, said she had been held at Dhaban prison in Jeddah from 2015 to 2018.
A year and a half after her arrest, she was told she had been charged with unspecified “cyber crimes.”
Her sister Huda Mohammad, who had been married to a Saudi national and has a daughter with Saudi citizenship, was imprisoned for a year and never informed of any charge.
Their two brothers were also held and later released, they said.
All four had been working in Saudi Arabia and have now returned to live in South Africa.
“We were never given an explanation as to why we were arrested,” Desai said, giving testimony on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council.
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