2023-08-30 15:00:06
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), July 19, 2023. SAUDI PRESS AGENCY / VIA REUTERS
On the scale of ubiquitous punishments which the Saudi Arabia of Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman has made his specialty, this is a new record. In July, a 54-year-old retired teacher, named Mohammed Al-Ghamdi, was sentenced to death for simple messages denouncing human rights violations in the kingdom.
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This cartoonishly harsh verdict was revealed in recent days by the NGO Al-Qst, which specializes in the defense of Saudi prisoners of conscience, as well as by the human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW).
So far, the most surreal sanction imposed by the Saudi judicial system was the August 2022 sentencing of a literature professor, Noura Al-Qahtani, to forty-five years in prison, for having criticized the government on the social networks and affirmed its support for Saudi prisoners of conscience. For a roughly similar “forfeit”, Salma Al-Shehab, a medical student, had been sentenced a few weeks earlier to thirty-four years in prison, later reduced to twenty-seven years.
Almost medieval absolutism
“The fact that a court can hand down the death penalty for nothing more than peaceful tweets attests that the repression in Saudi Arabia has reached a terrifying new stage, alarmed Joey Shea, researcher at HRW. The Saudi authorities have taken their campaign to stifle any form of dissent to a staggering level. »
Like the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, this verdict brings to its climax the contradictions inherent in the program of Mohammed Ben Salman. The one nicknamed “MBS” intends both to open up the kingdom from a mores point of view, for example by granting women the right to drive and by developing tourism, and to close it down from a political point of view, by imposing an almost medieval absolutism.
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The judgment against Mohammed Al-Ghamdi was rendered on July 10 by the specialized criminal court of Riyadh, in charge of cases labeled “terrorism”. This resident of Mecca, unknown until then in opposition circles, was found guilty of“attack on the status of the king and the crown prince” and of “support for a terrorist ideology” based on its activity on X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube. Two platforms where he relayed the words of dissidents.
According to the HRW investigation, the defendant, who had been arrested at his home a year earlier, was kept in solitary confinement for four months and was only able to speak with his lawyer shortly before the opening of the trial. To justify the unprecedented harshness of their sentence, the magistrates argued that “the magnitude of actions” of Mr. Al-Ghamdi was “amplified” by social networks. A grotesque mention, because according to HRW, the two Twitter accounts that this ordinary Saudi used did not total more than ten followers.
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