Theft
Petty theft is a problem especially in crowded areas. The nation has strict laws prohibiting drug trafficking; drug trafficking meets capital punishment. Saudi Arabia has signed all the three international conventions on drug control. To curb money laundering, improved anti-money laundering laws have been enacted. The country has implemented all the forty recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) for combating money laundering and all the eight recommendations of the FATF regarding terror financing. A Financial Intelligence Unit is also set up for the purpose of monitoring flows of funds.
The most common crime in 2002 was theft, which accounted for 47% of total crime in the nation. Saudi Arabia is a destination point for workers from South and Southeast Asia who are subjected to conditions which include involuntary servitude, non-payment of wages, confinement and withholding of passports as a restriction on their movement. Domestic workers are particularly vulnerable because some are confined to the house in which they work unable to seek help. Saudi Arabia is also a destination country for children trafficked from other Middle Eastern countries like Yemen, African countries like Nigeria, Mali, Somalia and Sudan and Asian nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan for the purpose of forced begging and involuntary servitude as street vendors. Some Nigerian women were reportedly trafficked into Saudi Arabia for commercial sexual exploitation.
Read more about this topic: Crime In Saudi Arabia
Famous quotes containing the word theft:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)
“Men are not therefore put to death, or punished for that their theft proceedeth from election; but because it was noxious and contrary to men’s preservation, and the punishment conducing to the preservation of the rest, inasmuch as to punish those that do voluntary hurt, and none else, frameth and maketh men’s wills such as men would have them.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“The childless experts on child raising also bring tears of laughter to my eyes when they say, “I love children because they’re so honest.” There is not an agent in the CIA or the KGB who knows how to conceal the theft of food, how to fake being asleep, or how to forge a parent’s signature like a child.”
—Bill Cosby (20th century)