Australia may accept Saudi woman fleeing family after UN deems her refugee

Australia's government said Wednesday it will assess the resettlement case of a Saudi woman who fled from her family now that a UN agency has deemed her a refugee, taking the woman's high-profile quest for asylum a step forward.

The Department of Home Affairs confirmed in a statement that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees had referred Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun, 18, to Australia for consideration for refugee resettlement.

Al-Qunun arrived in Bangkok on a flight from Kuwait on Saturday and planned to continue to Australia, where she held a tourist visa. But after being detained by Thai authorities, she refused to board a flight back to Kuwait, barricading herself in an airport hotel room.

After getting worldwide attention with dramatic posts on social media in which she said she feared for her safety if made to return home to her family, al-Qunun eventually was placed in the care of the UNHCR, as her bid for refugee status was considered.

Australia's Home Affairs Department said it would "consider this referral in the usual way, as it does with all UNHCR referrals."

Indications from Canberra suggest al-Qunun may receive a sympathetic hearing.

"If she is found to be a refugee, then we will give very, very, very serious consideration to a humanitarian visa," Health Minister Greg Hunt told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. before the UNHCR's referral.

The unique thing about this case is that she had access to social media, and was able to report on it and bring the world's attention to her plight.- Elaine Pearson, Human Rights Watch

The case has highlighted the cause of women's rights in Saudi Arabia. Several female Saudis fleeing abuse by their families have been caught trying to seek asylum abroad in recent years and returned home. Human rights activists say many more similar cases will have gone unreported.

The influence of the internet on al-Qunun's case was noted by several human rights advocates.

The representative in Australia of Human Rights Watch, Elaine Pearson, said it was encouraging al-Qunun was able to highlight her situation using social media, and she hoped more Saudi women might act similarly.

Voices of solidarity

"The unique thing about this case is that she had access to social media, and was able to report on it and bring the world's attention to her plight," Pearson said. "I think there are many cases like this that go unreported."

A similar point was made by UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch, who said what was different in al-Qunun's case was "the wave of all of the voices of solidarity and support came together, joined up in terms of caring for this individual."

Thailand's immigration police chief, Lt.-Gen. Surachate Hakparn, said al-Qunun's father and brother arrived together in Bangkok on Tuesday, but al-Qunun refused to meet them.

Al-Qunun's father denied physically abusing her or trying to force her into an arranged marriage, among the reasons she gave for her flight, Thailand's Immigration Police chief said after meeting him Wednesday.

The father, whose name was not released and who was not seen by reporters, said he wants his daughter back but respects her decision, Surachate said. He described the man as being a governor in Saudi Arabia.

A 'family affair'

Surachate discussed her case on Tuesday with Saudi Charge d'Affaires in Thailand Abdalelah Mohammed A. al-Sheaiby. In a video clip of the meeting released by Thai immigration police, Sheaiby is heard telling Thai officials: "From the moment she arrived, she opened a new account and her followers reached almost 45,000 in a day. And I would have preferred it better if her phone was taken instead of her passport."

The comments sparked anger on social media. Surachate said police could not confiscate her phone, because she was not being detained, and the Saudi diplomat's remark was "just an opinion" and "nothing to be taken seriously."

A Tuesday statement from the Saudi Embassy in Thailand denied interfering in Qunun's case, and said it was only monitoring her situation. Describing her case as a "family affair," it said Saudi officials had neither seized her passport — as al-Qunun had claimed several times — nor demanded her deportation back home.

The embassy and Thai officials earlier said Qunun was stopped by Thai authorities because she did not have a return ticket, a hotel reservation or itinerary to show she was a tourist, which appeared to have raised a red flag about the reasons for her trip.

Saudi Arabia's wider human rights record has come under intense scrutiny since the killing of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi in October.

Khashoggi, who wrote critically of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in columns for the Washington Post, had been living in self-imposed exile in the U.S. before Saudi agents reportedly killed and dismembered him inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

The kingdom offered various shifting accounts of the circumstances of his death before eventually settling on the explanation that he died in a botched operation to forcibly bring him back to Saudi Arabia.