Cairo: The Swedish foreign minister accused Saudi Arabia of blocking her speech at an Arab League meeting on Monday due to her stance on human rights in the region, Swedish media reported.
“The explanation we have been given is that Sweden has highlighted the situation for democracy and human rights and that is why they do not want me to speak,” Foreign Minister Margot Wallstroem told news agency TT in Cairo.
“It’s a shame that a country has blocked my participation.”
An Arab diplomat confirmed that Riyadh had stopped the Swede from making her opening speech.
Wallstroem had been invited as an honorary guest to the Arab ministers’ meeting in praise of her government’s decision to recognise Palestine in October.
Wallstroem has rarely mentioned Saudi Arabia publicly but in January she slammed the kingdom’s treatment of blogger Raef Badawi, who had been sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for insulting Islam.
She tweeted criticism in January, calling the flogging a “cruel attempt to silence modern forms of expression.” Comment from the Saudi Arabian government was not immediately available.
“One must protest against what are nearly medieval methods” of punishment, she told TT.
Yet her country has a decade-long arms-trading deal with Riyadh which is due for renewal for another five years in May.
The deal has come under fire within Wallstroem’s Social Democrats, while their Green Party coalition partners oppose it categorically.
Wallstroem’s “feminist foreign policy” aims to “strengthen gender equality, improve women’s access to resources and increase women’s representation,” she said before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last week.
