Human Rights

More Saudi Youths Sentenced to Die

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

What is known is that as of today, October 19, ‪Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, a 20-year-old Saudi sentenced to death by beheading, has not been beheaded. His body has not been crucified and then displayed, which is also a horrifying part of his sentence. Because corporal and capital sentences are usually carried out on Fridays—after public prayers—dread accompanies the approach of each Friday for friends and family of those sentenced, and then with the absence of any word from Ali’s family, a tense non-relief follows. But he is not the only under-age prisoner in Saudi Arabia who has been sentenced to death by beheading.

The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights (ESOHR) has been publicizing three stories: Ali al-Nimr’s and those of Dawood Hussain Almarhoon and Abedallah al-Zaher. All three were arrested before they were 18 years of age, all three have been held in prison since the arrests (each young man was arrested in 2012), and all three have been almost certainly tortured.
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Thoughts on Raif Badawi & the Nobel Peace Prize

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The name of the winner of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, October 9. That is 11:00 a.m. in Oslo, Norway, which is … well, really very early in the morning in Goshen, New York, time. (5:00 a.m. EST, in case you want to know.) I hope to be tuning in at that time, and I hope to hear one name in particular: Raif Badawi, a 31-year-old writer and activist from Saudi Arabia who sits in a Saudi prison as a result of his writing. He was convicted of “insulting” his nation’s religion in his writings.

If his name is spoken on Friday morning in Oslo, that does not mean the fight has been won for Raif Badawi, his wife and family, or his many supporters around the world, as he still is in prison and most likely will not be allowed to leave his prison cell or his country to collect the medallion. He also faces 19 more sessions with a whip, as his prison sentence of 10 years includes 1000 lashes with a cane.
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Help End Beheadings

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Besides sign petitions and click “like” next to articles that describe conditions that must be changed in the world, there is not much that one can do or give in a material sense to aide the pursuit of transparency and justice. Every so often, the opportunity arises, however.

For any readers of this web site who live in the United Kingdom, you can help affect change in your nation’s policies, today. The rest of us can help, as well. The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice has an outstanding £5.9m bid on a contract to provide prison expertise, “training needs analysis,” to Saudi Arabia. According to news reports, the previous Minister of Justice, Chris Grayling, set up a wing of the department that would sell its knowledge about prisons and prisoner management to those who want to pay for the know-how. It was called Just Solutions, or JSi. The current justice minister, Michael Gove, shuttered the program and stated that the department needs to maintain its focus on domestic issues. (I am combining news sources here: The Guardian, Financial Times, International Business Times.)

This is a contract to provide expertise to another nation’s internal, domestic criminal justice system, one that uses capital punishment, unlike the United Kingdom, which does not have capital punishment. Not only does Saudi Arabia use capital punishment, it uses beheading as its method, performs the punishment in public, and kills for crimes that most Western nations do not consider crimes: sorcery, apostasy (not believing in the correct deity), adultery. It also employs corporal punishment, something very few nations, including the United States, do not use. It flogs its citizens for reasons that include writing things its regime does not approve of.

The Ministry of Justice said all the right things, about how it would have a positive, even liberalizing, effect on the Saudi justice system, but it made no claims as to how this might take place. (Freedom of information requests have been denied to this date, and not all the details of the proposed contract are available.)

When the advice-selling section was closed this year, the Ministry of Justice at first claimed that the contract process with Saudi Arabia was so far along that it would be financially damaging for the United Kingdom (£5.9m? really?) to pull out now but then deleted any such claims from the official record. It continued to insist that the contract must go forward, however.

Thus, the official reason for the contract going forward is that it exists.
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