Geneva — After four years, eight months, and four days of unjust imprisonment, Entisar Al-Hammadi was released today from the prison of a group that appointed itself as God’s agent and built, on the ruins of justice, a repressive system that views free women as threats, beauty as a crime, and difference as a sin. Her release is not a favor from her jailers, but the restoration of a fundamental right that was stolen from her — and reclaiming it does not erase the duty to demand justice, accountability, and redress.
This is a compounded crime that did not begin with her arbitrary arrest on February 20, 2021, nor did it end with her release today. It reflects a regime that judges people for their looks, thoughts, and colors rather than their actions, reshaping social consciousness under the shadow of fear. In the areas controlled by the group, law has been transformed into an armed religious discourse that criminalizes freedom, sanctifies obedience, and reproduces slavery in a new form.
Entisar Al-Hammadi is not merely a young woman freed from prison — she embodies a Yemeni woman besieged for her beauty, oppressed for her difference, and humiliated for defending her dignity. Each time she was summoned for interrogation, her femininity was tried before her humanity, her image was punished before her voice.
She endured physical and psychological torture, coercion into false confessions, racist insults, class-based discrimination, and violations of her privacy and dignity through demands for a forced virginity test. With silent dignity, she refused to become a tool in her captors’ hands when they offered her freedom in exchange for betrayal — choosing captivity over selling her soul to power.
Meanwhile, her family lived a parallel prison: a mother deprived of peace and sleep, a blind father who could only imagine his daughter’s face, and a disabled brother waiting for her voice to calm his heart. That small family carried the weight of silence and the false shame the oppressors tried to plant among people — they resisted with faith, breath, and an exhausting, endless wait.
Entisar’s pain is not individual; it is the eternal suffering shared by women in Houthi prisons, where the body becomes a battlefield, womanhood a crime, and silence a temporary survival. Behind those walls remain dozens of women facing the same fate — deprivation, humiliation, social stigma, and double punishment from both authority and a society that has long remained silent before the crime.
Society — with its authorities, elites, and institutions — has failed to protect its women from abuse. Often, it reproduces the oppressor’s rhetoric in the language of fear or justification. Instead of solidarity, silence prevailed — forgetting that silence in the face of injustice is complicity. Entisar’s freedom is a moral test for us all: do we have the courage to call things by their names and confront evil when it cloaks itself in religion and tradition?
True justice is not fulfilled by releasing the victim; it begins when the perpetrator is held accountable, investigations are opened, violations are acknowledged, and victims are compensated materially and morally. Gratitude is not due to those who released after oppressing, but to those who resisted silence and carried the truth to the end.
SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties calls for:
An independent international investigation into Entisar Al-Hammadi’s detention and abuses, and the prosecution of those responsible under international law.
Compensation and full redress for the years of imprisonment, torture, and humiliation.
The release of all women and detainees arbitrarily held in Houthi prisons and an end to repression based on moral, political, or class grounds.
Protection of Yemeni women from gender-based violence and empowerment in justice, participation, and dignity.
Entisar’s release today does not close the chapter of pain; it opens the chapter of a living memory.
Her story will remain a testament that freedom is never a gift from tyrants — it is the reclamation of a dignity they sought to destroy.
Issued by SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties
Geneva – October 25, 2025