Twelve men from Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority were sentenced to death in 2016, after being convicted of spying for Iran in an unfair mass trial of 32 people arrested across Saudi Arabia in 2013 and 2014. They have been transferred to the ‘Presidency of State Security’, a body under the King’s direct authority mandated to address all state security matters.
Responding to these news , Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Director, said “The families of the men are terrified by this development and the lack of information provided to them on the status of the cases of their loved ones”.
“Given the secrecy surrounding Saudi Arabia’s judicial proceedings, we fear that this development signals the imminent execution of the 12 men,” he added.
The Saudi government’s communications office could not be reached for comment on the cases.
A Saudi delegation heard calls from Western countries at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva for the kingdom to abolish the death penalty.
According to Amnesty, 34 Saudi Shia are on death row, including four minors, Middle East Eye reported.
Shiites have long complained of entrenched discrimination in majority-Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, a charge the authorities deny, and have periodically staged mass protests in the kingdom’s eastern region where many of them live.
In January 2016, the kingdom executed prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, one of the most vocal critics of the Al Saud royal family and a figurehead in the 2011 Arab Spring protests.
An absolute monarchy, Saudi Arabia bans political parties and public forms of protest and has sentenced members of a civil rights organization who campaigned for a constitutional monarchy to decades in prison, Reuters mentioned.
Dozens of intellectuals and clerics have been detained since last year in a crackdown on dissent, including a prominent economist since charged with joining a terrorist organization and meeting with foreign diplomats.
Women’s rights activists were arrested in May, just before the lifting of a ban on women driving, and were similarly branded as traitors and “agents of embassies” in state-backed media.
A UN report released in June said that the Persian Gulf kingdom was systematically using its counterterrorism laws to suppress human rights defenders.
“Those who peacefully exercise their right to freedom of expression are systematically persecuted in Saudi Arabia,” the report said. “Many languish in prison for years. Others have been executed after blatant miscarriages of justice.”
Riyadh’s human rights record has been in the spotlight since the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at its Istanbul consulate last month.
Upon murdering the critic journalist and arresting a large number of civil, legal and ideological dissidents, a senior Saudi official admitted the country has received 258 warnings from international bodies.
According to the official Saudi Press Agency, the issue has been acknowledged by bin Mohammed Al-Aiban the president of Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Commission.
He said among the recommendations (warnings), there is also a call for an impartial and transparent investigation into slaying Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident journalist, IRNA noticed.