A report from Human Rights Watch last week noted some 
modest but positive developments in Saudi Arabia during the five years of rule by King Abdullah.

"Today, Saudis are freer than they were five years ago," it said. "Saudi women are less subject to rigid sex segregation in public places, citizens have greater latitude to criticise their government, and reform in the justice system may bring more transparency and fairness in judicial procedures."

So far, so good – though as The Economist points out, the reforms are still pretty tentative. But what worries Human Rights Watch is that these changes are mostly due to personal interventions by the king. "Should his enthusiasm for reform wane, or successors tread more conservative paths," the report warns, "his legacy would be one of a brief respite of fresh air, but not one of institutional reform."

It continues: "The monarch, in his mid-eighties, has shied away from adopting the often-simple measures needed to entrench rights, build capacity to enforce them, and generate the political will to hold rights violators accountable. As a result, these newly gained freedoms are, for the most part, neither extensive nor firmly grounded."

Based on experience elsewhere in the Middle East, these fears are well justified. We have seen the governments of Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Bahrain, for example, loosen the reins for a while – only to tighten them again.

Human Rights Watch suggests that enshrining Saudi Arabia's recent changes in the law would help to institutionalise them. Up to a point, it might. But the real problem is paternalistic rule: whatever freedoms people have are granted through the benevolence of an absolute monarch rather than being treated as an intrinsic right.

As The Economist puts it: "Saudis have heard barely a whisper of one day setting the pace of change themselves."

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 5 October 2010.