Saudi rights activist al-Hathloul hopes for sentence change

Rights activist al-Hathloul, who was released in February after three years in prison, appeared at an appeal hearing.

Women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, who was released last month after serving three years in prison, has said she hoped a Saudi court would amend her sentence as she headed to an appeals hearing on Wednesday. “Let’s hope the sentence has been changed or modified a little bit. We will see how it goes,” al-Hathloul, 31, told reporters outside Riyadh’s Special Criminal Court on Wednesday, before entering for a second session regarding her appeal. Al-Hathloul, who championed women’s right to drive and for an end to Saudi’s male guardianship system, was detained in May 2018 and sentenced under broad cybercrime and counterterrorism laws in December to nearly six years in prison on charges that United Nations rights experts called spurious.