Three Saudi youth may face punishment for appearing on the MTV reality show True Life to talk about ways they’re resisting the country’s strict morality, after the Saudi religious police filed a lawsuit against them for the crime of “openly declaring sin.”

The police are trying to drag the three into court and, if successful, charge them. The teens starred in an episode of the MTV documentary series, which originally aired in Saudi Arabia on May 24, called “Resist the Power! Saudi Arabia.” The program followed three characters, identified only by their first names: Aziz, who tries to meet his girlfriend for a date; Fatima, who tries to open a business selling cloaks in colours other than black; and Ahmad, who thinks women should be able to run for and hold elected office.

On the show, Aziz says, “We are not free to live as we like,” and describes the difficulty he experiences when trying to go on dates in Jeddah with his girlfriend.

An officer at the Jeddah court said it would take at least a week to decide whether to proceed to trial.

The Saudi judiciary system, based on an austere reading of Islamic sharia law, metes out harsh punishments for morality offences, sometimes including lashes with a whip and years of imprisonment. Last year, a Saudi named Mazen Abdul-Jawad was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and five years in prison for discussing his sexual affairs on a show televised by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation.

“It will be very difficult to stop the religious clockwork once this gets to court,” a Saudi lawyer told Reuters yesterday. The True Life subjects “may face harsh sanctions like those dealt to Abdul-Jawad.”

–True Life “Resist the Power! Saudi Arabia” will air in Canada on July 12 at 3 p.m. ET on MTV2. Click here for more details. mtv.ca/tvshows/true-life for more information.

with files from Reuters