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Saudi Arabia will lift its ban on women drivers in June 2018, in a move the interior minister said would "transform traffic safety":
Saudi Arabia's lifting of a much criticized ban on women drivers will reduce the number of car crashes in a country with one of the world's worst traffic-related death rates, its interior minister said on Thursday.
King Salman announced the historic change on Tuesday, ending a conservative tradition which limited women's mobility and was seen by rights activists as an emblem of their suppression in the kingdom where Islam originated.
Saudi Arabia was the only remaining country in the world to bar women from driving, a policy that will officially end in June 2018 after a ministerial committee reports on measures needed for implementation.
Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Nayef, the interior minister who took over from his uncle in June, said security forces were ready to apply traffic laws to men and women, though he did not mention if women would be recruited as traffic police.
"Women driving cars will transform traffic safety into a pedagogical practice which will reduce human and economic losses caused by accidents," he was quoted as saying on the ministry's official Twitter feed. He did not elaborate.
The current King of Saudi Arabia was crowned on January 23, 2015.
Also at the Washington Post. NYT has teaching activities for your students.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday September 30 2017, @11:57AM
The last time I was in Saudi Arabia (1990-1991), the situation was interesting.
King Fahd had made a deal with the United States for the US military to occupy Saudi soil in the wake of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The US military mobilization meant, among other things, soldiers and vehicles. And soldiers and vehicles meant American women wearing--because of the high temperatures--nothing but uniform trousers, boots, and T-shirts, driving around in HMMWVs and trucks as if they owned the place.
Because of the striking difference between half-naked (by local standards) American women confidently driving anywhere they please vs. Saudi women fully covered head to toe disallowed to drive anywhere, there was some degree of local agitation.
And so dozens of Saudi women staged a protest [npr.org], driving through the city of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to draw attention to the discrepancy....
It seems like now, almost 30 years later, their efforts are finally bearing some fruit.
Good job, ladies.