The WTA agreed a three-year deal for Saudi Arabia to host a match which sees the eight main girls’s singles gamers and finest eight doubles groups of the season compete.
This yr’s whole prize cash of $15.5m (£12m) is the most important in girls’s sports activities historical past, says the WTA.
Many critics declare the funding into top-class sport is a transfer to realize legitimacy and deflect consideration from controversy over Saudi Arabia’s human rights document, a apply referred to as ‘sportswashing’.
Whereas there have been reforms – the ban on girls driving, for instance, was formally lifted in 2018 – considerations in regards to the kingdom’s suitability to host outstanding girls’s sport occasions stay.
“There continues to be gender-based discrimination in most points of household life, together with in marriage, divorce and little one custody,” Fakih instructed BBC Sport.
The Saudi Tennis Federation (STF) was requested by BBC Sport to handle these considerations in the course of the WTA Finals, however didn’t make any of its officers out there for interview.
Marketing campaign group People Rights Watch say there isn’t any proof the WTA’s presence is bettering girls’s rights in Saudi, pointing to an “absence of motion” in circumstances involving girls imprisoned for advocating for change.
Manahel al-Otaibi, a health influencer and activist, is serving a five-year jail sentence for tweets supporting girls’s rights.
“The Saudi authorities proceed to detain my sister whereas they persist of their charade of whitewashing their picture and claiming to empower girls in entrance of Western media,” her sister Fawzia al-Otaibi instructed BBC Sport.
Al-Otaibi’s different sister Mariam stays underneath a journey ban, whereas dealing with restrictions on her speech and entry to authorities companies, in line with People Rights Watch.
“Seeing human rights defenders who have been jailed and are nonetheless being imprisoned right this moment – circumstances which have been identified earlier than the WTA went in – is an efficient indicator of the shortage of progress,” Minky Worden, director of worldwide initiatives at Human Rights Watch, mentioned.
“It is clear the Saudi authorities do not feel any significant strain to do something.”
Muguruza has visited the Kingdom a number of occasions because the Finals moved there, going into communities to go to faculties and golf equipment with a spotlight of attracting extra feminine tennis gamers.
From these experiences, she says the ladies she has met are “so glad” the occasion is happening on their doorsteps.
Requested if she is fielding considerations about ‘sportswashing’, Muguruza mentioned: “No, I do not suppose so.
“That was most likely a dialog two years in the past or one thing when individuals have been extra unfamiliarised with the sports activities right here, however I believe that is over.
“There are such a lot of occasions right here in sports activities and it has been very profitable. I do not really feel that, no.”
