Executions in Saudi Arabia surged last year to a record high, Amnesty International said Monday, as activists increasingly warn about the kingdom’s use of the death penalty in non-violent drug cases.
Saudi Arabia executed 345 people last year, the highest number ever recorded by Amnesty in over three decades of reporting. In the first six months of this year alone, 180 people have been put to death, the group said, signalling that record likely will again be broken.
This year, about two-thirds of those executed were convicted on non-lethal drug charges, the activist group Reprieve said separately. Amnesty also has raised similar concerns about executions in drug cases.
Saudi Arabia has not offered any comment on why it increasingly employs the death penalty.
It is one of several countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, that can levy the death penalty on drug-related charges. But the kingdom remains one of the world’s top executioners behind only China and Iran — whose execution numbers are often hard to accurately gauge — and its use of executions in drug cases appears to be fuelling that.
Short-lived moratorium on drug-related executions
Amnesty documented the cases of 25 foreign nationals who are currently on death row, or were recently executed, in Saudi Arabia for drug-related offences.
More than half of those executed this year in the kingdom were foreign nationals, according to Reprieve.
One such national, Egyptian Essam Ahmed, disappeared in 2021 while working on a fishing boat in Sinai. A month later, his family received word he had been detained in Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death for drug trafficking. Ahmed claims he was forced by the boat’s owner to carry a package for him at gunpoint.
“We’re living in terror, we’re scared every morning,” said a member of Ahmed’s family, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity fearing his comments could impact the case. “Every morning until 9 a.m., we’re afraid that they took one of them for execution without us knowing.”
Ahmed’s story is all-too common, Amnesty said, in a country where an estimated 76 per cent of the workforce is comprised of migrant workers.
“Low-wage migrant workers caught in Saudi Arabia’s ‘war on drugs’ possess little capital to prevent their exploitation at the hands of experienced, fraudulent agents or to afford legal representation that would effectively defend their rights once in Saudi Arabia and facing the death penalty.”
In 2021, as part of the crown prince’s criminal justice overhaul, Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Commission announced a moratorium on drug-related executions. The moratorium, however, remained in place for just under three years, before it was scrapped without an explanation.
Before that period, Amnesty documented that 76 per cent of the 202 people executed for drug-related offences between 2017 and 2019 were migrant workers.
In a 10-year period review, migrant workers from Pakistan were the most likely to be executed solely for drug-related offences, a total of 155, with 69 migrant workes from Syria and 50 from Jordan executed for drug offences.
Saudi Arabia executing foreigners, drug offenders at record pace: Amnesty
CBC
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/saudi-executions-amnesty-report-1.7578614
Executions in Saudi Arabia surged last year to a record high, Amnesty International said Monday, as activists increasingly warn about the kingdom’s use of the death penalty in non-violent drug cases.
Saudi Arabia executed 345 people last year, the highest number ever recorded by Amnesty in over three decades of reporting. In the first six months of this year alone, 180 people have been put to death, the group said, signalling that record likely will again be broken.
This year, about two-thirds of those executed were convicted on non-lethal drug charges, the activist group Reprieve said separately. Amnesty also has raised similar concerns about executions in drug cases.
Saudi Arabia has not offered any comment on why it increasingly employs the death penalty.
It is one of several countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, that can levy the death penalty on drug-related charges. But the kingdom remains one of the world’s top executioners behind only China and Iran — whose execution numbers are often hard to accurately gauge — and its use of executions in drug cases appears to be fuelling that.
Short-lived moratorium on drug-related executions
Amnesty documented the cases of 25 foreign nationals who are currently on death row, or were recently executed, in Saudi Arabia for drug-related offences.
More than half of those executed this year in the kingdom were foreign nationals, according to Reprieve.
One such national, Egyptian Essam Ahmed, disappeared in 2021 while working on a fishing boat in Sinai. A month later, his family received word he had been detained in Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death for drug trafficking. Ahmed claims he was forced by the boat’s owner to carry a package for him at gunpoint.
“We’re living in terror, we’re scared every morning,” said a member of Ahmed’s family, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity fearing his comments could impact the case. “Every morning until 9 a.m., we’re afraid that they took one of them for execution without us knowing.”
Ahmed’s story is all-too common, Amnesty said, in a country where an estimated 76 per cent of the workforce is comprised of migrant workers.
“Low-wage migrant workers caught in Saudi Arabia’s ‘war on drugs’ possess little capital to prevent their exploitation at the hands of experienced, fraudulent agents or to afford legal representation that would effectively defend their rights once in Saudi Arabia and facing the death penalty.”
In 2021, as part of the crown prince’s criminal justice overhaul, Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Commission announced a moratorium on drug-related executions. The moratorium, however, remained in place for just under three years, before it was scrapped without an explanation.
Before that period, Amnesty documented that 76 per cent of the 202 people executed for drug-related offences between 2017 and 2019 were migrant workers.
In a 10-year period review, migrant workers from Pakistan were the most likely to be executed solely for drug-related offences, a total of 155, with 69 migrant workes from Syria and 50 from Jordan executed for drug offences.