The year 2022 marked a new phase for Saudi Arabia's use of the death penalty, with a return to a high number of executions, continued arbitrariness in issuing sentences, and contradicting official promises, in parallel with complete disregard for international recommendations and criticism.
In 2022, Saudi Arabia executed 147 people, marking more executions than the previous two years combined. This includes 81 people killed in one day in March 2022, in the largest mass execution in Saudi Arabia’s history. Between 2021 and 2022, there was found to be an increase in sentences executed of 119%, while the percentage increase between 2022 and 2020 was 444%. According to the official Human Rights Commission, 27 sentences were executed in 2020, and 67 carried out in 2021.
According to the data of the Ministry of the Interior, the nationalities of 147 executions in 2022 were as follows: Saudi (114), Syrian (6), Yemeni (9), Pakistani (3), Ethiopian (3), Egyptian (3), Jordanian ( 3), Indonesian (2), Nigerian (2), Palestinian (1), Myanmar (1). ESOHR monitored the execution of one woman, an Ethiopian national who was executed after being sentenced to death for Hirabah.
Tazir (discretionary) sentences, which are not based on an explicit legal text and depend on the judge’s discretion, constituted the highest percentage of the types of sentences implemented; 88 people were executed under Tazir sentences. An additional 15 people were executed by Qisas (retributive) rulings, and 4 people were sentenced by Hirabah (mandatory rulings). The Ministry of Interior did not confirm the type of rulings carried out against 40 people.
In light of the lack of transparency in the official handling of the death penalty, and the absence of any role for civil society, it is difficult to track the cases and therefore also the violations that detainees are exposed to. Despite this, the monitoring of ESOHR shows a pattern of violations, starting from arrest, and ending with the implementation of sentences and refusal to return the bodies of those killed.
The cases that ESOHR was able to track confirmed that detainees have been deprived of their basic rights, including the right to self-defence and to communicate with the outside world. Additionally, judgment documents showed detainees’ complaints before judges, which alleged they were subjected to torture and ill-treatment and that confessions were extracted from them under torture. No serious investigation or accountability concerning torture was monitored. Rather, judges relied on coerced confessions in issuing death sentences.
In addition to the violations in the course of the trials, ESOHR documented violations in executions, as Saudi Arabia continued to deny families their right to say goodbye. Death sentences were implemented in secret, without informing families of the place and method of implementation, and families were subsequently denied the right to burial and to hold public funeral ceremonies, as Saudi Arabia continued a policy of holding bodies after execution.
In addition to the record numbers and the systematic policies that perpetuate violations in the course of Saudi practices in 2022, there is an continuance of the arbitrary and political use of the death penalty, as demonstrated by the reality of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s control over the judiciary.
Mohammed Bin Salman's Statements and Official Promises:
On 3 March 2022, in an interview with The Atlantic newspaper, bin Salman stated that Saudi Arabia got rid of the death penalty, except for the category of Qisas, which is mentioned in the Qur’an and is limited to cases in which someone kills another person or threatens the lives of more than one person. He also stated that the only problem that Saudi Arabia is working to solve is to ensure that there is no punishment except by law, explaining that discretionary sentences given by the judge, or Taazir rulings, will be stopped over the next two or three years.
This statement came after a series of promises of reform over the past years:
In April 2018, bin Salman said in an interview with Time magazine that there is work to build new laws to significantly reduce executions. In August 2018, Saudi Arabia passed the Juvenile Law, which stopped issuing death sentences against minors. On March 24, 2020, a royal order was issued to stop the execution of all death sentences, as a deterrent measure against minors, and to reduce all death sentences issued against minors to 10 years in a prison sentence. In January 2021, the official Human Rights Commission said in a statement on Twitter that Saudi Arabia would temporarily suspend death sentences for drug-related offences.
The course of executions, the numbers and quality, especially in 2022, reveal the false nature of these promises and their use in Saudi attempts to polish its image.
Mass Massacre
On 12 March 2022, Saudi Arabia carried out the largest mass execution in its history, with 81 people, including 7 Yemenis and one Syrian. The Saudi Ministry of the Interior published a statement in which it made public accusations, and stated that: “They embraced deviant ideology, curricula, and deviant beliefs with external loyalties and hostile parties, and pledged allegiance to them on corruption and misguidance, so they committed terrorist acts, such as spilling blood, violating sanctities, and targeting places of worship, government headquarters, and vital places.”
ESOHR documented some cases of those execution in the mass execution, and the documentation showed that the trials involved heinous violations of justice, including torture, ill-treatment, and deprivation of the right to self-defence. Approximately 41 of those executed faced charges related to participation in demonstrations and expression of opinion, and most were non-lethal charges.
The United Nations, through its various mechanisms, had communicated with the Saudi Arabian government about several of the cases of a number of those executed, including Asaad Shubar and Muhammad al-Shakhouri, and confirmed that their trials involved several violations, including torture and lack of adequate self-defence.
The mass massacre is the third that was carried out during the reign of King Salman bin Abdulaziz and his son. Saudi Arabia carried out a massacre in January 2016 that affected 47 people, and in April 2019 Saudi Arabia massacred 37 people on one day.
Drug-Related Executions:
On 10 November 2022, Saudi Arabia returned to implementing Tazir (discretionary) death sentences on drug-related charges, after stopping their implementation in 2020. From 10 November to 23 November, Saudi Arabia executed 20 people for drug crimes, of different nationalities, at an average of 1.5 executions per day, according to official published data.
Returning to the implementation of these sentences has broken the official promises made by the former head of the Human Rights Commission, Awwad Al-Awwad, in which he stated that Saudi Arabia had suspended the implementation of death sentences for drug crimes with the aim of “giving individuals facing non-violent charges a second chance.”
There is currently no official data on the number of detainees facing the death penalty on drug charges in Saudi Arabia, but information confirms that there are dozens, at least, of different nationalities facing this punishment and therefore their lives are in danger. Among those threatened with death at any moment is the Jordanian national, Hussein Abu al-Khair, whose detention the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has confirmed is arbitrary, while calling for his release.
Secret Executions:
Setting a dangerous precedent in the carrying out of executions, and days after the Ministry of Interior stopped publishing any statement related to the execution of death sentences, ESOHR received information from several sources confirming the implementation of secret executions in prisons, without announcing them through the usual official channels.
The information indicated that detainees in different prisons of several nationalities were executed, including detainees facing drug-related charges in Tabuk prison.
On 29 December 2022, Muhammad Moqbel Al-Wasel and Shaja’a Salah Jamil, who were detained in Saudi Arabia, called their families in Yemen, where they were informed that they are in the execution arena and would soon be executed. According to the family, Al-Wasel had travelled to Saudi Arabia to work at the age of 15, and the family did not know any details about the reasons for his arrest and the course of his trial. The two families confirmed that the Saudi government refused to give any information about the circumstances of the execution and that they had not received any information about their wills, personal belongings, or the fate of their bodies.
No statement by the Ministry of Interior or official information about the two executions was monitored, which portends a change in the Saudi government's usual practice of publishing the executed sentences.
Current Situation
It is not possible to know the exact number of individuals facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia due to the lack of transparency, and there are obstacles in following up on judicial stages of those facing this punishment. Despite this, the ESOHR's follow-up confirms that there are dozens of different nationalities facing execution on drug-related charges.
In addition, ESOHR monitored 61 cases in which people face the death penalty, distributed over various levels of procedural posture. Among those at imminenet risk are two Bahraini citizens, Sadiq Thamer and Jaafar Sultan, whose death sentences were approved by the Supreme Court as a Tazir (discretionary) sentence.
Among those currently threatened are at least 8 child defendants: Abdullah al-Howaiti, Abdullah al-Derazi, and Jalal Labad, who are facing approved rulings from the appeal and awaiting the ruling of the Supreme Court, and Hassan Zaki al-Faraj, Youssef al-Manasif, Jawad Qureiris, Ali Hassan al-Subaiti, Mahdi al-Mohsen, who have been sentenced to death.
In addition to minors, dozens are facing Tazir (discretionary) death sentences, including charges related to participating in demonstrations, chanting slogans, and other charges that are not considered among the most serious in international law.
Additionally, among the individuals for whom the Public Prosecution is demanding the death penalty are prisoners of conscience, such as the academic Hassan al-Maliki and scholar Salman al-Awda.
ESOHR believes that in 2022 Saudi Arabia has blatantly and bloodily shown the reality of its abuse of the death penalty, breaking previous promises, laws, and royal orders in the whitewashing and improving of the country’s image.
The course of action also confirmed that children are still threatened with death, that those accused of crimes that are not considered among the most serious are not exempt from the death penalty, and that Saudi Arabia does not care about justice and its conditions for issuing sentences that end the lives of individuals. The organisation considers that the executions, which ignored international laws, criticism and legal analysis, show the complete control of Mohammed bin Salman over this type of punishment, and its political use to intimidate those in Saudi society away from any dissent.