“Saudi Arabia flagrantly violates the right to life”.
These are the first words of the report published Tuesday, January 31 by two NGOs – Reprieve and the Saudi Organization for Human Rights (Esohr) – to designate the policy of the Wahhabi kingdom in terms of capital punishment.
Worse: the authors of the report – which analyzes executions in Saudi Arabia over the period 2010-2021 – note that “the use of the death penalty has increased drastically since 2015”, the year when King Salman acceded to the throne with his son, Prince Mohammed ben Salmane, Prime Minister who in fact directs the affairs of the kingdom.
The number of executions in the Gulf monarchy has risen from an average of 70.8 per year (2010-2014) to 129.5 per year (2015-2022) – an 82% increase in killings in Saudi Arabia .
In total, the current power has applied more than 1,000 death sentences, according to the two NGOs - which claim to have cross-checked official figures with investigations and interviews carried out with lawyers, family members and activists.
In detail, the six bloodiest years for executions in the country's recent history have all occurred under the current regime – only the years 2020 and 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, do exception.
We studied data from 2010 onwards.
The six bloodiest years of executions in Saudi Arabia's modern history have all been under the leadership of MBS and King Salman (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2022).
pic.twitter.com/IKM6SDNDGI
— Reprieve (@Reprieve) January 31, 2023
"The explosion in the number of executions in Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman is a crisis that the international community cannot continue to ignore," said Maya Foa, director of the NGO Reprieve, in a statement.
"The Saudi death machine is grinding up children, protesters, vulnerable women in domestic service, unwitting drug couriers and people whose only 'crime' was possessing banned books or talking to foreign journalists."
“High proportion” of discretionary death sentences
The report finds that the power in place “deploys discretionary death sentences (executions decided outside the legal framework, editor’s note) in a high proportion” of cases – in particular for non-lethal offenses.
Between 2010 and 2021, 542 executions (43% of the total) took place for non-lethal offenses, and the overwhelming majority of these executions were for discretionary death sentences (94%, or 513 out of 542).
And among these executions, 103 people were carried out by the Saudi specialized criminal court ("specialized criminal court", SCC) in the context of so-called "terrorism" and "state security" offenses.
Legal grounds that led to the execution of 46 people (45%) for exercising their fundamental rights, participating in pro-democracy protests and peacefully exercising their freedom of expression.
It should also be noted that the number of people executed following convictions by the CSC "increased considerably after 2015" and the coming to power of King Salman and "MBS", according to the report, while no executions for CSC death sentences were recorded between 2010 and 2014.
“Saudi Arabia uses the death penalty, including to quell the opposition, to quell dissenting voices.
It is for the power in place to control the population to suppress any right of expression, any right to demonstrate, any right of association… Everything is done to silence the Saudi population and the dissident voices”, explains to France 24 Jean-Claude Samouiller, President of Amnesty International France.
Executions in Saudi Arabia 'shrouded in secrecy'
In addition to the discretionary death sentences, the report of the two NGOs points to “an application of the death penalty in Saudi Arabia tainted with discrimination and injustice”.
The Gulf monarchy still routinely executes and sentences children to death, despite proclaiming internationally that it ended the practice in 2020. Saudi Arabia has also resumed executions for related offenses. to drugs last November when the Saudi Commission for Human Rights declared that it had taken a moratorium on this subject, in January 2021.
Mohammed ben Salmane affirmed, however, last March, to the American magazine The Atlantic, that the Wahhabi kingdom had "rid itself" of the death penalty - except for cases of murder or when the accused "threatens the life of many people".
Saudi Arabia refuses to publish death penalty data and doesn't notify families or return bodies.
So there is no way of knowing the true size of Saudi Arabia's death row.
The executions documented in our report are a baseline figure – the true number may be significantly higher.
— Reprieve (@Reprieve) January 31, 2023
Finally, executions in Saudi Arabia are “shrouded in secrecy”, conclude the two NGOs, which state in their report that “the regime refuses to publish its data on the death penalty and does not inform families of executions or return not the bodies”.
A lack of transparency that allows the power in place to “hide its abuses and hampers the efforts of other states and organizations to hold it to account.”
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