Loujain Al-Hathloul is a prominent Saudi women’s rights activist. She is known for spearheading the campaign against the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia, for which she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. In 2017, while living in the UAE, she was hacked by the group DarkMatter through the illegal mercenary program known as Project Raven, then later extradited to Saudi Arabia, where she was detained, imprisoned, and tortured.

In May 2021, the Supreme Court upheld the verdict of the Specialised Criminal Court (SCC) appeals division, which sentenced her to five years and eight months in prison (with two years and 10 months suspended) on 28 December 2020 for tweets about the Women2Drive campaign, and audios of her explaining the male guardianship system. For more information on the charges against her, see here.

She was conditionally released on 10 February 2021 after spending two years and nine months in detention, but prohibited from freely expressing her opinions in public or travelling. In 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit on her behalf in order to hold DarkMatter accountable for hacking her. Her story has inspired the children’s storybook Loujain Dreams of Sunflowers, in which a little girl learns to fly despite being told that only boys can.