A 34-year-old American woman has been detained in Saudi Arabia after she posted on Twitter that she and her young daughter had been lured to the kingdom and trapped there since 2019.
Carly Morris told relatives three years ago that she was planning to travel to Saudi Arabia for a brief period so that her eight-year-old daughter could meet her paternal grandfather. However, Morris then became locked in a years-long struggle to take her young daughter back out of the kingdom over the objections of her Saudi ex-husband. Morris’s efforts to leave have been made more difficult by Saudi Arabia’s strict male guardianship laws.
US officials on Tuesday confirmed to the Associated Press the detention of Morris, a native of California. Spokesman Ned Price said: “Our embassy in Riyadh is very engaged on this case, and they’re following the situation very closely.”
Morris was detained after being summoned to a public prosecutor’s office on Sunday in connection with an allegation that she was “destabilising public order”, according to an official document seen by the Guardian. The document states that Morris is American and lists her occupation as “housewife”.
The summons followed Morris’s publication of a lengthy statement on Twitter, in which she warned other women and children against visiting the kingdom. In the statement, she said she and her daughter had been held “against our will” in a hotel under “extreme and dire circumstances”, where they faced “extended social isolation” since 2019.
The whereabouts of Morris’s daughter, who is also an American citizen, are unknown.
The Saudi embassy in Washington and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to an email from the Associated Press seeking comment.
The case marks the latest instance of a dissident or critic of the Saudi government being detained or convicted for using social media. Human rights activists at the Freedom Initiative, which has followed Morris’s story, said she was the third American being held in detention in Saudi Arabia.
“Morris’ detention means that we’re now aware of three Americans behind bars in Saudi Arabia, yet another sign that Saudi simply does not value the US as an ally,” said Allison McManus, the Freedom Initiative’s research director. “Before we hear any more reference to Saudi’s strategic partnership, we need to see an end to the abuse of American citizens. We need to see an end to the abuse of women and children whose only crime is their gender.”
In another case, a 34-year-old mother named Salma al-Shehab, who was completing her PhD at Leeds University but returned to her native Saudi Arabia for a short vacation, was convicted and sentenced to decades in prison for following and liking tweets by some Saudi dissidents while she was living in the UK.
In her Twitter statement, Morris said: “We have spent the past three years under these conditions and deprived of our basic human rights and our lives stolen from us. For over three years I have attempted to seek help from every government office and authority. My situation has downplayed, neglected, and mishandled.”
In her warning to others, she said: “You will be stripped of your dignity, honor, and rights. You will be placed under dehumanizing circumstances. And anyone, at any point, can do anything to you, and you will not receive the desperate help that you need, and there will be no justice. In fact, you will be blamed and criminalized in return.”
Morris’s case began receiving attention in August, when her situation became known to some human rights defenders who spoke to the media.
In an interview with the Guardian, Morris’s mother, Denise White, said Morris had decided to take a short vacation to Saudi Arabia so that her daughter could spend time with her father’s family. Morris is divorced from her daughter’s father, who is Saudi. The former couple met while he was living in the US, White said.
White said she had expressed concerns to her daughter at the time about her travel plans. “She kept saying ‘we’ll be back before you know it,’” White said.
Morris later told her mother that her passport and her daughter’s passport had been taken by her ex-husband after she arrived. More recently, Morris told her mother that she had been banned from traveling and that she was “scared something is going to happen”.
“She did tell me she felt like she was trapped there,” White said. “She met with the US embassy and Saudi officials, there was some kind of meeting, and during that meeting she said she felt there was no solution.”
White said she last spoke to her daughter a few days ago, but then got a notification from a human rights defender that Morris was being held.
White said Morris recently called Morris’s husband on his mobile phone to tell him she had been arrested but did not know what the charges were. She was calling from prison, she said.
Another American, Saad Ibrahim Almadi, 72, who was returning to his native Saudi for a vacation, was arrested in November 2021 and recently sentenced to 16 years in prison for tweeting critically about the regime.