In Saudi Arabia this year, 130 executions, most of them opponents of bin Salman

Saudi authorities have executed more than 130 people since the beginning of the year, most of them opponents of bin Salman, including six who were children at the time of their arrest, the anti-death penalty organization said.

At least 24 other detainees are at risk of imminent execution, three of them children, the organization said in its report, which coincided with the start of the work of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The report said that most of those executed were opponents of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, critics of his policies, or human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia.

Opponents and Shiites
The International Criminal Court's lawyer, Baroness Helena Kennedy, said at the end of July, that the executions in the Kingdom included 37 political opponents executed in a mass manner, noting that most of the executions were carried out by Saudi Shiites in the eastern region.

British House of Lords member Baroness Djanet Whitaker called on her country's parliament and government to exert all pressure on the Saudi authorities to stop them from carrying out executions and fair trials.

Rodney Dixon, an international human rights lawyer, called on the United Nations, the Human Rights Council and the international community to pressure Riyadh to stop executions and reform its judicial system.

The Saudi judiciary
In a previous bulletin on Al Jazeera, international lawyer and human rights activist Juliet Wells said that "human rights abuses in the Saudi judicial system have increased the number of people sentenced to death, based on confessions extracted under torture."

In June, the Arab Organization for Human Rights in Britain carried out a media campaign in international newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian, calling for the abolition of the death penalty in Saudi Arabia and an international investigation into the executions.

Since King Salman bin Abdulaziz and his son Muhammad took power on January 23, 2015, until June, 709 people, including seven children, have been executed in Saudi Arabia, Amnesty said.

The largest mass executions were on January 2, 2016, when the authorities executed 47 people, including four children convicted of acts under the legal age of criminal responsibility, Amnesty said.