The father of a young woman who suffered physical and mental abuse at the hands of her husband has condemned the transfer of her court case from Bisha to Najran, the ruling district of which the accused husband is resident. The man has now asked human rights groups to intervene to help his daughter Nouf seek a divorce and gain custody of her two children. “The case has taken a complicated and nonsensical direction,” the father said on Wednesday. “It began with Al-Hazimi police authorities in Bisha, the region of my daughter's residence, and was brought to the General Investigations and Prosecutions Bureau which passed it on to police authorities in Balqarn with a view to it going to a court there. The police decided, however, to return the case to police in Bisha given that that is the residence of the complainant, my daughter Nouf.” Police in Balqaran reportedly acted on instructions that cases involving women should be heard in the districts of their residence, but the case was then passed on to authorities in the district of the husband's residence in Najran. Nouf was admitted to hospital in January after suffering physical abuse on the part of her husband, and according to her father one of his grandchildren has also suffered distress requiring specialist attention after witnessing the violence committed against his mother. The case, first reported on January 19 of this year, was the 16th case of domestic violence committed against women recorded by Bisha's Social Protection Committee over a period of a year. Nouf, who worked as a nurse, was reported as having suffered violent abuse from her husband for more than a year, and the head of the Social Protection Committee said at the time that the necessary measures were being taken to protect Nouf and her children. A hospital report described her as suffering from head pains and injuries to the back of her head, bruises, and swelling to the right eye. The truth about the six-year marriage was discovered after Nouf's husband took a second wife and wrote to Nouf's father. “I got a letter from him telling me to take my daughter and her children back, and that he'd married another woman,” Nouf's father said in January. “So I took them home, and my wife then discovered the extent of her injuries. I then informed the police.” “They had moved to Najran due to her husband's work, but he would hit her and threaten her, even after giving birth to the two children,” he said. Now Nouf's father has appealed to the National Society for Human Rights for help in the case, which he has also criticized as suffering from “prolonged routine bureaucratic procedures”. The Social Protection Committee in Bisha said on Wednesday that the committee had followed the case from the beginning and had taken the necessary measures.
