Current Events

1000 Days

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For the sixth week in a row, Saudi writer, blogger, and activist Raif Badawi was not publicly flogged today for insulting his home country’s state religion. Amnesty International broke the news as soon as the organization could confirm it:

No one is breathing a sigh of relief that this counts as sparing him, or that he is about to be freed. The 31-year-old husband and father has now spent 1000 days in jail with little to no contact with the outside world. According to news reports, there was no reason given by Saudi officials for the delay.
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#FreeRaif, Week 5

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For the fourth week in a row, Raif Badawi, a writer in Saudi Arabia, was not whipped fifty times yesterday as part of his public punishment for insulting his nation’s official religion in his blog. No one is breathing a sigh of relief that this counts as sparing him, or that he is about to be freed.

Amnesty International broke the news this morning via Twitter:

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Raif Badawi, Week 3

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For the third week in a row, Raif Badawi, a writer in Saudi Arabia, was not whipped fifty times yesterday as part of his public punishment for insulting his nation’s official religion in his blog. No one is breathing a sigh of relief that this counts as sparing him, or that he is about to be freed.

Last week, when I wrote about this ongoing story (“An Update about Raif Badawi“), I quoted one speaker from an article in the Guardian and gave the partial identification given in the article as the complete identification of the speaker. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein is indeed a Jordanian prince in the Hashemite dynasty, the same family that the current King of Jordan is the head of. Perhaps more importantly, Prince Zeid is the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and has been since September. It is not the Guardian’s mistake that I did not do all of my reading. It is my error.
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