Manama: A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a college student to 30 hours of community service after he was caught with an unrelated young woman.
The court in the Eastern Province governorate of Qatif said that the 19-year-old student will have to perform his community service at the central hospital in Dammam.
The student was apprehended after he was involved in a traffic accident and the police investigated to determine its cause.
The policemen discovered that the young woman with him was not a relative and when they pressed for information, they were told they had just met at a public place.
The student said that she had signalled to him to stop and that he had agreed to drive her to a place, local news site Sabq reported on Tuesday.
According to the court, the student said that he had regretted offering the young woman the ride.
Saudi Arabia is very strict about unrelated people of the opposite sex mixing in public.
Courts in the kingdom have embraced the concept of alternatives to prison as a way to make the community benefit from services and to help reduce crowding in the country’s jails.
Last month, the High Judiciary Council told the local courts the concept of alternatives to prison was among the recommendations reached by the interior ministry’s centre for research on combating crime after it conducted a study on the crimes related to “disobedience to parents” and several workshops on the issue.
Alternative options to spending time in jail include working in homes for the elderly, engaging in ritual washing of corpses, digging graves and providing services at rehabilitation centres.
The council said that the courts should play an active role in the alternatives to prison to help ease the number of inmates in the country’s jails.
Social network users have welcomed the idea and called for its implementation to help young juveniles and avoid locking them up with other inmates who might have a negative influence on them.
Earlier this year, reports in Saudi media said that the Ministry of Justice was working on a new alternative sentence law that would be ready before the end of December.
The law would be the legal framework needed by judges to issue their verdicts that would keep offenders out of jail and make them do community work instead in a bid to reduce the number of prisoners by 50 per cent.
According to the reports, the alternative sentences currently issued by some courts are being handed down based on the judge’s discretion.
The alternatives under the new law would be confined to punishments for minor cases that include attempts to flirt with women, public quarrels and certain domestic violence cases.
