Ali Mohammed al-Nimr

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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How to Be Brave

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Bravery is a skill. I do not know if I have cultivated it in myself.

A young man sits today in a prison, awaiting a death sentence to be carried out, possibly this Friday. Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 when he was 16 or 17 years of age (both ages have been reported), making him a juvenile at the time of his arrest. He was arrested at a protest. His country is Saudi Arabia, and the protests in 2012 in other autocratic nations in that region had been effective in fostering change. At trial, he was not given access to the “evidence” amassed against him, in no small part because there was no such evidence. He was convicted, no joke, of stealing every gun and every uniform from a local police station, single-handed.
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An Imminent Beheading

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released a statement Tuesday night urging Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of ‪Ali Mohammed al-Nimr‬ because he was “convicted for a crime reportedly committed as a child.” It is rare that a specific person’s specific case be the subject of such a statement.

The statement reads, “Any judgment imposing the death penalty upon persons who were children at the time of the offence, and their execution, are incompatible with Saudi Arabia’s international obligations.” It reminds Saudi Arabia that it is a party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Because Ali’s trial was conducted unfairly, the UN OHCHR argues, “International law, accepted as binding by Saudi Arabia, provides that capital punishment may only be imposed following trials that comply with the most stringent requirements of fair trial and due process, or could otherwise be considered an arbitrary execution.” Thus, Ali’s impending execution must be halted and a new trial set up.
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