Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia announced that around 50 Saudi women have been chosen to enroll in a one-year diploma in criminal law. Speaking to Arab News, the country’s Attorney General Sheikh Saud Al-Mujib explained that these women will be “trained in many subjects, visit different branches of public prosecution offices, and will be working with them, including with forensic medicine.” This week, there has been more good news from the Kingdom regarding women breaking into what was once a traditional male-centric sector, as the Saudi Ministry of Justice (MoJ) revealed that female staff at Jeddah Criminal Court are working to serve clients and have already provided over 7,000 services in the past 2 months.
According to Saudi Gazette, these women have been working to check documents, verify applications, make referrals, and responding to inquiries, helping more than 2,500 clients, extending more than 3,200 information services, and reviewing over 1,350 applications. The news site also reported that the female staff are tasked with performing various tasks at the court as well, such as reception and information desk work, verifying statements of claim, public relations-related work, and referrals from online portal to the relevant departments.
In line with its efforts to diversify its economy away from oil dependency, Saudi Arabia has also been looking into its legal apparatus in order to study and optimize legal processes and soften bureaucracy in favor of businesses. In addition, its Vision 2030 roadmap mandates an increase in the percentage of women in the workforce across all sectors. As a result, the fabric of the country’s legal sector has been changing to become more inclusive, which has today resulted in a record number of women working in various sectors, including Saudi Arabia’s Justice sector, taking up a number of positions as social researchers, Islamic jurisprudence researchers, legal researchers, administrative assistants, software programmers, and more.
