Saudi Arabia let's women drive from June 2018

Riyadh (Saudi Arabia): Saudi Arabia Government has announced that it would lift the ban on women and allow them to drive effective June 2018.

The change was announced in a royal decree read live on state television and in a simultaneous media event in Washington.

Saudi leaders also hope the new policy will help the economy by increasing women’s participation in the workplace. Many working Saudi women spend much of their salaries on drivers or must be driven to work by male relatives.

“It is amazing,” said Fawziah al-Bakr, a Saudi university professor who was among 47 women who participated in the kingdom’s first protest against the ban in 1990.

“Since that day, Saudi women have been asking for the right to drive, and finally it arrived,” she said by phone. “We have been waiting for a very long time.”

Rights groups and Saudi activists have long campaigned for the ban to be overturned, and some women have been arrested and jailed for defying the prohibition and taking the wheel.