Saudi Arabia has begun implementing amendments to allow adult women to travel without permission and give them more control over family affairs, following a series of royal decrees approving the amendments, the official SPA news agency reported.
Riyadh has long faced international criticism over the status of Saudi women. Human rights organizations say women are treated as second-class citizens under laws that require them to obtain guardian consent in important decisions about them throughout their lives, whatever their age.
The authorities have gradually reduced these restrictions over the past few years, one of which was to lift the ban on women driving last year.
A series of royal decrees published this month backed the trend after the kingdom came under increasing international scrutiny over its human rights record.
The amendments stipulate that a Saudi passport is issued to any citizen applying for a visa and that anyone over the age of 21 can travel without permission.
For the first time, the amendments gave women the right to register births, marriages, divorces, extract official family documents and guardianship of minor children.
"Passports and civil status departments and their branches in all regions of the Kingdom have started to implement the amendments stipulated in the Royal Decree," the official SPA news agency quoted an Interior Ministry source as saying.
A Saudi newspaper reported that more than 1,000 women in the Eastern Province left Saudi Arabia on Monday without the permission of their parents, in what appeared to be an early application of the new rules.