The Saudi PR machine is relentless. On Twitter, the Saudi Human Rights Commission presents a country leading the fight against human trafficking, where women are liberated and everyone enjoys fair and equal protection under the law.
Meanwhile the family of imprisoned women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul have not heard from her for two months, and fear she is being subjected to more torture.
According to the Center For Responsive Politics, in 2018 the Saudis spent $38 million on lobbying in the US alone. This was in two phases: Mohammed Bin Salman’s spring tour of photo ops with Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, and efforts to contain the fallout from the state-sanctioned killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October.
With his 2019 acknowledgement that “it happened under my watch,” MBS hoped to draw a line under the affair, but a more fundamental reset is needed if Saudi Arabia’s goal of becoming “an exemplary and leading nation in all aspects” is to be realized by 2030, as planned.
COVID-19 has hampered the Kingdom’s presidency of the G20—it was recently announced that the November summit planned for Riyadh will now happen online—but there will never be a better opportunity to show that promises of reform are more than spin.
On his 2018 charm offensive, the Crown Prince’s line on the death penalty was unambiguous: the Kingdom would seek to “minimize” executions, but “if a person kills a person, they have to be executed in our law.” The following year, Saudi Arabia executed 185 people, a modern record, including 82 for non-violent drug crimes.
Under Saudi criminal law, there are three categories of death sentences: Hudud death sentences are mandated by the interpretation of the Shari’a favored in Saudi Arabia, a Qisas death sentence is sought in retribution by the family of a murder victim, and a ta’zir sentence is handed down at the discretion of a judge.
Drug smuggling is in the latter category. In June, it was reported that the Shura Council, which advises the royal family, had proposed abolishing ta’zir death sentences. “This will improve [the kingdom’s] reputation and its human rights record,” council member Faisal al-Fadhel told Saudi media.
The Saudi HRC has been briefing diplomats and journalists that a moratorium on executions for drug crimes is in place, on orders from the top. It is hard to assess this, with executions effectively paused for months due to the pandemic.
International law condemns the death penalty, but allows that states which have not yet abolished it may use it as a punishment for intentional killing only. Under King Salman, Saudi Arabia has executed almost 300 people for drug crimes, mostly foreign nationals.
Although Saudi Arabia is a conservative country, recreational amphetamine use is common, particularly among the wealthy. The people convicted of smuggling tend to be vulnerable migrants, tricked or coerced into carrying drugs. (Prince Abdel Mohsen Bin Walid Bin Abdulaziz, busted with a private jet full of Captagon at Beirut airport, is an exception.)
Reprieve is working on the case of a 56-year-old Jordanian, Hussein Abo al-Kheir, arrested at the border on his way to work as a driver for a Saudi family in Tabouk, in March 2014. Customs officers found thousands of amphetamine pills in the fuel tank of his car, and after 12 days of torture, including being hung upside down and beaten all over, Hussein signed a confession. The following January, he was convicted of smuggling and sentenced to death.
For five years, this poor taxi driver, father to eight children, has been imprisoned, wondering if today is the day he will be beheaded. He has consistently denied knowing the pills were there, and clearly lacked both the means to buy them in Jordan and the connections to sell them in Saudi Arabia. He is at worst a dupe, not a kingpin, yet the Kingdom could execute him at any time.
Ending the death penalty for non-violent crimes and commuting the sentences of people like Hussein would halve the number of executions in the Kingdom, saving hundreds of lives. It will take much more to rehabilitate the image of a state that murders journalists, tortures women’s rights activists and executes people for attending peaceful demonstrations as children, but this would be a major positive step.
The international community now has an opportunity to engage with their partners in the Kingdom – to potentially great effect. At the United Nations and the G20, they can skim the glossy brochure of a more tolerant, more just society, or they can demand meaningful change. Will they support reform, or enable more abuses?
Maya Foa is the director of legal action charity Reprieve.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
