The Saudi question: Executions thwart trust in reforms

WASHINGTON: Since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, took over the reins as de facto ruler in 2017, Saudi Arabia has been marked by two conflicting developments. In a far-reaching modernization process, dubbed Saudi Vision 2030, the government has started to diversify its economy from oil, has opened the country to tourism and improved women’s rights. At the same time, however, the government in Riyadh is resorting increasingly to counter-terrorism laws to clamp down further on society, targeting rights activists and other members of civil society who are not in line with its policies, including certain religious scholars.

There has also been a considerable rise in the number of executions. A recent report by the international anti-death penalty organization Reprieve and the Berlin-based European Saudi Organization for Human Rights (ESOHR) highlighted that the number had almost doubled since 2015. It stated that an average of 70 executions had been carried out between 2010 and 2014, while the number had increased to 129.5 between 2015 and 2022.

“The average number of executions has risen by 82% even as the country has projected a modernizing image to the outside world,” the report said. In an interview with DW, ESOHR’s director Ali Adubisi explained the reasons for this conflicted development. “The concept of modernization practiced by MBS is selective and subject to political moods,” he said. “The executions are an essential pillar of MBS’ repressive behavior through which he practices intimidation against his people to ensure as much silence as possible.”

This view was confirmed by Julia Legner, executive director at ALQST, a London-based human rights organization that focuses on defending and promoting human rights in Saudi Arabia. “If the authorities were genuine about reform, they would allow the Saudi population to be at the center of it,” she told DW. “However, in a place with no free civil society, reforms by the authorities are a political tool to silence criticism inside and outside the country.”

Sebastian Sons, a senior researcher for the Germany-based Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient, agreed that despite Saudi Arabia’s economic diversification and ongoing social liberalization, there was little sign of political opening. “In fact, quite the contrary has become the norm as repression has turned into an integral part of Saudi rule under MBS,” he said.

He added that the government had also repeatedly emphasized that those being sentenced to death were terrorists and that their trials were internal affairs that the West should not interfere in. He said Saudi Arabia frequently argued that the trials were imperative for guaranteeing national and international security.

Though the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 caused widespread outrage around the world and led to a temporary isolation of Saudi Arabia, most trials against activists or critics of the government fail to draw international attention.

Such trials take place regularly at the Saudi Specialized Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction over terrorism and cases related to state security. But in 2022, judges there sentenced two women — ­Salma al-Shehab and Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani — to 35 years and 45 years respectively for retweeting posts by women’s rights activists.

“The Saudi definition of terrorism effectively provides the judiciary with a discretion to levy harsh sentences, including the death penalty and unprecedentedly long prison sentences against individuals for simply criticizing the government,” Ramzi Kaiss, a legal and policy officer at the Swiss-based MENA Rights Group, told DW.