Here’s more from Saudi Arabia in which you have to decide whether it’s coming from a court or a Dickens novel. Saudi Gazette reports on the case of a man jailed for four months for speaking to the press about his unhappiness with a court’s verdict, a verdict that seems irrational at best.

Now, it is possible for a person to be jailed for contempt of court, but that usually involves violating a specific court order. According to this piece, no such order was given, that is, the court did not give the man prior warning that he should not talk to the press. (Whether that prior restraint is reasonable is itself a debatable issue.) But incarcerating someone, seemingly because they simply annoyed a judge, does appear to be a violation of human rights, not a proper action of the court.

Codification of Saudi law cannot come too soon.

Man jailed for speaking out against court ruling
Joe Avancena
AL-KHOBAR – A Saudi man has spent two weeks from his four-month prison term for speaking to a local newspaper against “unjust” court verdict in his own divorce case.

The jail ruling was handed down by the same judge.

The verdict was a flagrant violation of human rights, the Saudi judicial system, and clear instructions of King Abdullah securing individual rights, said Sheikh Mekhlef Al-Daham, a human rights activist and representative of the National Human Rights Society(NHRS) in the Eastern Province. Taking up the case of Ammer Al-Shammari whose wife was divorced against his will by a court order, Al-Daham said “After my client’s Syrian ex-wife, from whom he has three children, was naturalized, she filed for divorce with no good reason and she was granted a favorable verdict from the court despite her husband’s objection guaranteed by the Shariah law.”

Ten days after the divorce was announced, the judge hit the man with three orders. He was ordered to move out of the family house, to stop visiting his children at the house, and to pay all utility bills incurred by the mother and her three children. The judge also ordered the man’s employer to deduct SR3,000 from his monthly salary to be deposited into the ex-wife’s account.

A year after the divorce, the woman married another man and handed over the house and the children to Al-Shammari. “On her second marriage news, Al-Shammari went to the same judge to report the new developments in the case, asking him to re-consider his original verdict.”It has been automatically void with her second marriage,” the judge replied to the man, Al-Daham said.
…