On August 9, 2022, the Specialized Criminal Court of Appeal in Saudi Arabia upheld a verdict to kill the minor Abdullah Al-Derazi (October 8, 1995 ) as a punishment, after a farcical trial that lacked the most basic conditions of justice.
Al-Darazi remained in pretrial prison for three years before his trial began in late August 2017. Despite telling the judges - during the course of the trial - that the confessions provided by the Public Prosecution as evidence against him were extracted from him under torture during the investigation period in which he was denied legal assistance, they issued. They sentenced him to death as a punishment after several sessions that lasted about 6 months (February 2018). The Public Prosecution Office did not provide any material evidence that he committed the alleged crimes, except for the confessions that were challenged.
On August 27, 2014, members of the Tarut Island Police Station arrested Abdullah Al-Derazi from the middle of the street after beating him severely. He was then eighteen years and ten months old. During his stay in the police station, he was subjected to beatings and various types of torture, in order to force him to confess specific confessions made to him by the interrogator. When he refused, one of the officers deceived him while his eyes were closed in order to convince him of the necessity of fingerprinting his release papers after deluding him that he had proven his innocence to them.
Al-Derazi was surprised by his transfer to the General Investigation Prison in Dammam, and later he discovered that the papers he had fingerprinted on were confessions written by the investigator. Throughout the three-year period of pretrial detention, Al-Derazi was denied his basic right to legal assistance, which constitutes a flagrant violation of local regulations and international laws. Al-Darazi was kept in solitary confinement for six months, during which time physical and psychological torture was inflicted on him in order to force him to sign confessions. During the first three months of his detention, his family was unaware of his fate because the Saudi security services concealed his whereabouts and did not inform them about it.
The torture practiced by members of the General Investigations against Al-Derazi caused burns around the eyes and broken teeth, in addition to pain in the knee and ear, which led to his transfer to the hospital more than once.
The Public Prosecution Office charged Al-Derazi with several charges, some of which were in childhood, none of which are classified as serious crimes. Among them: participating in the formation of a terrorist cell aimed at destabilizing the internal security in the country and targeting security men, participating in demonstrations and marches, attacking and destroying public property, carrying out acts of sabotage and chaos, obstructing the road and seeking to cause strife, division and division in the country, assaulting security men by throwing explosion bottles at them, blocking the road for pedestrians by burning tires, chanting anti-state slogans, participating in Ahmed Al-Matar’s funeral and organizing the funeral (distributing water during it). The Public Prosecution exaggerates and fabricates charges that were not included in the investigation books and the statements extracted under torture. In which Al-Darazi's statements did not mention the formation of a terrorist cell.
In an interview with the American magazine “The Atlantic” on March 3, 2022, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that Saudi Arabia has "eliminated" the death penalty, except for one category mentioned in the Qur'an, which is related to murder. In the first half of this year, Saudi Arabia witnessed an unprecedented horrific escalation in its history, with 120 executions executed by the end of June. 81 of them were executed by Saudi Arabia on March 12, 2022, in a mass massacre that is considered the largest since its establishment. More than half of the victims have not been charged with murder, which shows that Mohammed bin Salman's statements 9 days before the massacre are false, misleading, and unreliable.
There is no transparency in the Saudi government's handling of the execution file. Despite this, the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights was able to monitor 33 cases of detainees facing demands and death sentences in Saudi Arabia, most of whom were not charged with serious crimes. Seven of them were charged with charges that date back to when they were minors, they are Abdullah Al-Hwaiti, Jalal Al-Labbad, Youssef Al-Manasif, Sajjad Al-Yassin, Hassan Zaki Al-Faraj and Mahdi Al-Mohsen. Three out of the total number (33) could be killed by Saudi Arabia at any moment after the Supreme Court approved their verdicts, and two others were upheld by the Court of Appeals, in addition to the minor Abdullah Al-Derazi.
ESOHR believes that the trial of the minor Abdullah Al-Derazi is arbitrary and lacks legal justification, because it came after flagrant violations of fair trial standards. It also considers that the approval of the death sentence by the Court of Appeal is an official Saudi denial of the statements of Mohammed bin Salman in which he claimed to get rid of the death penalty. In addition, the organization stresses that this ruling is a clear violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Domestic Juvenile Law (2018), which prohibits the execution of children, and is a contempt for the royal order issued in 2020 that the system must be implemented.