Human Rights Organizations: Saudi Arabia’s Claims to Have Banned the Death Penalty for Juveniles are Belied by the Kingdom’s Actual Practices

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia con­tin­ues to use the death penal­ty against peo­ple accused of crimes com­mit­ted as juve­niles, despite a roy­al decree claim­ing to ban that prac­tice, human rights orga­ni­za­tions and defense lawyers have charged. 

On October 19, 2020, the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights issued a state­ment say­ing that thir­teen pris­on­ers still faced the death penal­ty in the king­dom for alleged crimes com­mit­ted as juve­niles. The fol­low­ing day, cit­ing ​“glar­ing excep­tions” in the roy­al decree, Human Rights Watch warned that eight Saudi men remained at risk of exe­cu­tion for ​“protest-relat­ed” acts engaged in while they were minors. The men were sen­tenced to death on ​“charges that do not resem­ble rec­og­niz­able crimes,” the rights group said, includ­ing ​“seek­ing to desta­bi­lize the social fab­ric by par­tic­i­pat­ing in protests and funer­al pro­ces­sions,” ​“chant­i­ng slo­gans hos­tile to the regime,” and ​“seek­ing to incite dis­cord and division.” 

In April 2020, Saudi Arabia car­ried out the 800^th exe­cu­tion under the reign of King Salman bin Abdulaziz. At the same time, Amnesty International issued its annu­al glob­al report on the death penal­ty, detail­ing the record num­ber of exe­cu­tions in Saudi Arabia in 2019 and the ris­ing polit­i­cal abuse of the death penal­ty through­out the Middle East.

Facing glob­al crit­i­cism, King Salman respond­ed with a roy­al decree assert­ing that the coun­try would no longer apply the death penal­ty to indi­vid­u­als who were younger than age 18 when their alleged crimes occurred. Instead, the King said, offend­ers faced a max­i­mum sen­tence of ten years at a juve­nile facil­i­ty. Although the kingdom’s Human Rights Commission has said the decree would be applied retroac­tive­ly, it has not yet been pub­lished in official form. 

“Saudi spin doc­tors are mar­ket­ing judi­cial reforms as progress while pros­e­cu­tors appear to bla­tant­ly ignore them and car­ry on as usu­al,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East direc­tor at Human Rights Watch. ​“If Saudi Arabia is seri­ous about reform­ing its crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, it should start by ban­ning the death penal­ty against alleged child offend­ers in all cases.”

“There has been so much talk of reform, but no actu­al change for our clients,” said Maya Foa, direc­tor of human rights group Reprieve which rep­re­sents three of the men fac­ing exe­cu­tion. ​“Authorities announced that the death sen­tences of Ali al-Nimr, Dawoud al-Marhoun and Abdullah al-Zaher will be reviewed, but not when or how: we will believe it when it happens.”

Saudi defense lawyer Taha al-Hajji, who is liv­ing in exile in Germany while rep­re­sent­ing al-Nimr, said Saudi offi­cials had still not told his client’s fam­i­ly that he is safe from exe­cu­tion. There remains a ​“gulf between rhetoric and real­i­ty,” he said.

Ali al-Faraj, one of the eight men iden­ti­fied in the Human Rights Watch report, was arrest­ed at 15 for par­tic­i­pat­ing in demon­stra­tions and funer­al pro­ces­sions. He was just nine years old at the time of one of the pro­ces­sions he was indict­ed for attend­ing. Ali al-Nimr was arrest­ed in 2012 at the age of 17. In an arti­cle in Foreign Policy, al-Hajji wrote that Nimir had been ​“tor­tured into giv­ing a false con­fes­sion [and] con­vict­ed of sup­posed ter­ror­ism offens­es for tak­ing part in anti-gov­ern­ment protests.… Since exhaust­ing his appeals, Nimr has spent five years won­der­ing whether each day will be his last.” All eight men are from Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, where most of the nation’s Shia minority live.

Saudi Arabia was elect­ed to the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2018 after telling U.N. mem­ber states the king­dom had elim­i­nat­ed the death penal­ty for child­hood crimes. It has engaged in numer­ous pub­lic rela­tions efforts to improve its world image. However, the Saudi gov­ern­ment went on to exe­cute at least six juve­nile offend­ers in 2019, Foya told the Middle East Eye. On October 13, Saudi Arabia’s bid for reelec­tion to the Human Rights Council failed in light of the kingdom’s mis­treat­ment of women, reli­gious minori­ties, and polit­i­cal activists, the war in Yemen, and the mur­der of jour­nal­ist Jamal Khashoggi.