Activism

Raif Badawi and Torture

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought is awarded each year by the European Parliament to those who have “dedicated their lives to the defense of human rights and freedom of thought,” as the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov did. The name of the winner is to be announced this Thursday. Raif Badawi, the Saudi Arabian blogger who was arrested and convicted of “insulting Islam,” is one of the three finalists for the award.

The Prize was created in 1988 and its past laureates include Nelson Mandela and Malala Yousafzai. Several of the award winners have lived their lives under harsh or repressive circumstances, as Andrei Sakharov did, and continue to face harassment or live in prison, as Raif Badawi still does. As of today, he has spent 1251 days in jail and was whipped once, all for his writings.

High-level reports are out today, October 27, that his punishment—the flogging—will resume this week in a terrible, unofficially official, commentary from the Saudi authorities about Raif possibly winning this prestigious human rights honor.
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An Impending Beheading

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

[Update, January 3, 2016: Sheikh Nimr was executed by beheading and his body crucified on January 2, 2016, by the authorities in Saudi Arabia. He was one of 47 executed that day. The oppressed Shia population in Saudi Arabia is protesting; Iran, a majority Shia nation is officially outraged. The Sheikh was a soft-spoken leader of that population.

Below is a post from October 2015.]

His family says that he has calmly accepted his probable fate: Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr is due to be beheaded soon, possibly this week. A post from his Facebook account this morning confirmed that Sheikh Nimr was informed by his family (rather than by a judge in a hearing) yesterday that a court upheld his sentence. It said that he thanked them for the information.

Sheikh Nimr is the uncle of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, the young man who has also been sentenced to die by beheading because he was arrested at a protest. The fact that Ali was arrested while he was a juvenile and his outrageous sentence of beheading and subsequent crucifixion—the public display of his dead body—garnered worldwide condemnation and even statements from leaders in other nations that used Ali’s name specifically in requests that he be spared, that he be set free; that specificity was somewhat shocking because politicians usually are not so specific and they employ that watered-down phrase “human rights in general” when they want to signify displeasure with an ally’s torching of human rights in general but without risking consequences. Political leaders in the United Kingdom have risked consequences in speaking Ali’s name; none have done so in my country.

The public display of outrage specific to Ali’s case sparked a similarly rare display of Saudi anger specific to the outrage when the Saudi embassy in London released a statement that decried the public statements and even named Ali.
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#FreeShawkan

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

So far in 2015, we have seen journalists beheaded with machetes, a blogger whipped with a cane as an official judicial punishment for his writing, editorial cartoonists gunned down in their office, bloggers hacked to death in Bangladesh, more than 20 journalists detained and even convicted and jailed in Egypt, and journalists detained in America for covering the racism prevalent in almost every official part of our system. Not a great year.

In August, a judge reaffirmed a guilty verdict against three al-Jazeera English journalists. Last month, President al-Sisi pardoned the journalists as a part of the annual Eid holiday tradition of leaders granting pardons. The current regime in Egypt does not much like journalists, and it is estimated that some two dozen writers and photographers are in prison in that country, having been arrested for doing their jobs. Usually, they are charged with “spying,” but more often than not they are detained for months or even years before they even hear why they were arrested or what charges they face.

Mahmoud Abu Zeid is a photojournalist whose work you may very well have seen, as his photographs have appeared in Time magazine and some of them were syndicated by Corbis. (One appears below the fold.) He covered the protests in Tahrir Square and the trial of former president Hosni Mubarak. His professional name is Shawkan. As of today, November 30, 2015, he has spent 838 days in pre-trial detention. His first court session is due to take place on December 12, but his lawyer reports to Amnesty International that he has yet to see Shawkan’s case file. Under Egyptian law, there is a two-year cap on pre-trial detention; 794 days is longer than two years.
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