Saudi court sentences Kenyan woman to 100 lashes for child born outside marriage

The sentence

A court in Saudi Arabia has reportedly sentenced a 40-year-old Kenyan woman to 100 lashes for giving birth outside marriage, a ruling issued in October according to a New York Times report. No public record of the trial exists, since Saudi criminal courts do not normally publish verdicts, and neither government commented when the newspaper asked. Saudi Arabia has no penal code, so judges have wide room to interpret offences under the sharia-based system. Whether and when the sentence will be carried out is unclear. Sex outside marriage is a criminal offence in the kingdom, but the newspaper found that unmarried mothers are not necessarily prosecuted.

How the case came to light

The woman, legally employed as a domestic worker through the recruitment firm Maharah Human Resources, became pregnant after a brief relationship with an Egyptian man who she says has since left the country. She gave birth to a son in summer 2025 in a workers' accommodation. A supervisor discovered her and the baby, and both were taken to hospital, where police questioned her before the case moved to court. Rights groups say the case surfaced only because she went to hospital, since such hospitals must report unmarried women who give birth to the authorities. Ekaterina Porras Sivolobova, founder of the non-profit Do Bold, which advocates for migrant workers in the Gulf, explained why such cases usually stay hidden.

“Most of them give birth at home, that's why they aren't reported.”

Life after the birth

After the birth, the accommodation refused her and a shelter turned her away, and Kenya's embassy provided no help. She lived for a time at a petrol station that had become a meeting point for stranded migrant women with children. She says she has tried without success to return to Kenya for more than a year. Only after the newspaper's reporting did she receive housing and exit documents again, but the ongoing court case means she has not been allowed to leave. She says, and court documents appear to confirm, that she was not provided a lawyer during the trial.

Rights groups and the reform claim

Maryam Aldossari, acting director of the UK-based rights group ALQST, called the sentence an act of violence and said the woman should have been sent back to Kenya rather than punished.

“It just shows the hypocrisy behind so-called Saudi reform.”

Aldossari also said Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, has tried to present Saudi Arabia to the world as a modern country that empowers women. Saudi Arabia announced in April 2020 an end to flogging as a judicial punishment, but the change applied only to ta'zir offences.

A wider pattern

A 2024 Guardian investigation found that Kenyan single mothers in Saudi Arabia had been abandoned by their children's fathers, who feared arrest for extramarital sex, and that some children born outside marriage were refused exit visas. UN special rapporteur Reem Alsalem had planned a visit to Saudi Arabia that was postponed earlier in November. She said she intended to raise specific cases during the visit and would otherwise pursue them through her mandate's established channels. Thousands of women from East Africa travel to the kingdom for domestic or nanny work, leaving them exposed to Saudi law as foreign workers and unmarried women.