Saudi’s brutal campaign to stifle dissent

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is said to have ordered the surveillance, detention and torture of Saudi Arabian dissidents according to a classified report read by US officials.

Background

Human rights in Saudi Arabia are subject to Wahhabi law enforced under the absolute command of the Royal Family, The House of Sa’ud. The regime is consistently ranked among the worst by Freedom House’s annual survey of civil and political rights.

Saudi Arabia is one among thirty countries in the world where corporal punishment is still practised. This includes amputations of hands and feet for robbery and flogging for lesser crimes such as "sexual deviance" and drunkenness.

In 2004, the United Nations Committee against Torture condemned Saudi Arabia for its policies of amputations and flogging that it carries out under Sharia Law. The Saudi delegation responded by saying that such  "legal traditions" were being followed since the inception of Islam 1,400 years ago and rejected the UN’s interference in its legal system.

Analysis

MBS is said to have authorized a secret campaign in order to silence the Kingdom’s dissenters. He has ordered the surveillance, detention and torture of such Saudi citizens almost a year before the killing of Jamal Khashoggi on October 2, 2018, according to a classified report read by US officials.

The members of the team that killed Khashoggi, had also been a part of several other missions since 2017. This leads many to believe that the journalist’s death was part of a wider scheme in order to silence all of Saudi’s dissenters.

The Saudi Rapid Intervention Group, the term that US officials coined were part of many missions involved in forcibly repatriating Saudis from different Arab countries. The operations involved the detaining of prisoners at the Saudi prince’s palaces.

A linguistic teacher, Eman al-Nafjan, who wrote a blog about the plight of women in Saudi Arabia tried to kill herself after being subjected to psychological torture when she was detained for voicing her thoughts.

In May 2018 there was a sweep of arrests that targeted rights activists, journalists and academics. The women activists were campaigning for a change in driving laws. The activists haven’t been released although the ban on women driving was lifted a month after the arrests. The charges filed against them include contacting foreign entities and international organizations.

Saudi Arabia's human rights record has been the subject of global criticism and was rebuked by the U.N. Human Rights Council on March 6, 2019, for the first time since the panel was established in 2006. They condemned the kingdom's rights record, specifically naming Loujain Alhathloul as well as activists Eman al-Nafjan and Aziza al-Yousef.

The Saudi government insists that the killing of Jamal Khashoggi was not ordered from Riyadh. They said that those responsible would be prosecuted. There are 11 suspects in the case facing criminal charges for the killing with the prosecutors seeking the death penalty for 5 of them.

The government has denied the existence of the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group and hasn’t commented on any questions regarding it. Saudi officials have previously acknowledged that the Saudi intelligence service has a standing order to bring back dissidents to the country raising doubts about the team set up to do it.

Assessment

Our assessment is that the “classified” report is a further indictment of the Saudi government. We feel that further investigations are necessary to prosecute the mastermind behind the killing. This is unlikely given that the ‘killers’ have already been identified and convicted.