Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir asked Canada to apologize for demanding the release of Saudi women’s rights activists and stop treating the kingdom as “a banana republic” if it wanted to resolve a diplomatic dispute between the two countries, Reuters reported.

“It is outrageous from our perspective that a country will sit there and lecture us and make demands,” al-Jubeir said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “You can criticize us about human rights, women’s rights ... others do and that’s your right. You can sit down and talk about it, but demand the immediate release? What are we a banana republic? (…). Apologize and say you made a mistake.”