Saudi Arabia has reportedly executed 12 people on drug-related charges in the past 10 days. One report states that some of them were decapitated with swords.
Up to 12 people, including three Pakistanis, four Syrians, two Jordanians and three Saudis, have been sentenced to death after being imprisoned on non-violent drug charges, The Telegraph reported.
In March this year, Saudi Arabia executed 81 of his people, convicted of various crimes, including murder and belonging to extremist groups, in the largest mass execution in the Kingdom’s modern history.
The recent new wave of executions comes almost two years after Saudi Arabia pledged to reduce such sentences. It followed the 2018 assassination of US journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey by a Saudi death squad on the orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
In 2018, the Saudi government also tried to keep the death penalty to a minimum by only executing those convicted of murder or manslaughter.
Saudi Arabia has executed at least 132 individuals so far in 2022, which is more than it did in the previous two years combined.
According to Maya Foa, head of Reprieve, Mohammed bin Salman has frequently proclaimed his commitment to progress, promising to curtail executions and abolish the death penalty for drug offences.
But as a terrible year of executions comes to a conclusion, the Saudi authorities have resumed publicly and covertly killing drug criminals.
The beheadings came despite Saudi Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s vow to reduce harsh punishments and curtail death sentences, especially for non-violent crimes.
Some failed promises
After the US writer Jamal Khashoggi was killed on the Saudi government’s orders, it appeared that Saudi Arabia was willing to revise its position on the death penalty.
In the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist based in the US renowned for his critical reporting of the Saudi regime, was killed.
Over the following months, various accounts of Khashoggi’s death surfaced, despite Arabia’s denials of any involvement.
Later on, though, the authorities reversed its stance and acknowledged that prosecutors’ early findings indicated the journalist passed away in a “fight” after refusing to be returned to the country.
Global pressure was applied to the nation’s government to change its stance on the death penalty and executions after Jamala Khashoggi was killed.
Following the widespread outcry, Crown Prince bin Salman promised in 2020 that the kingdom would limit the use of the death penalty and would only carry out executions for violent offences in accordance with Islamic law. The most recent beheadings, however, show that the Kingdom still has a ways to go before fulfilling its promise.
March 2022: Mass murder
The beheadings come after the widespread execution of more than 80 men in March 2022.
In a statement, the nation’s Interior Ministry released the identities of all 81 individuals who were killed for offences such as murder and affiliations with international terrorist organisations as well as the vaguely worded offence of “monitoring and targeting officials and expatriates.”
In a statement released on March 14, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet stated that the executions “may constitute a war crime” and did not follow international human rights and humanitarian law. I denounce the mass executions in the nation , she declared.
The detainees, who had been convicted in particular Saudi terrorist courts, had been permitted to exercise “their full rights under Saudi law,” according to authorities. The murder of innocent men, women, and children, as well as “allegiance to foreign terrorist organisations,” were among the “many terrible acts that left a huge number of citizens and law enforcement officials dead,” according to a statement from the Saudi Ministry of the Interior.
However, according to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 41 Shia Muslims who had participated in anti-government demonstrations had been put to death, along with seven Yemenis and one Syrian who had been detained in relation to the government’s military interventions in their nations. According to the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESOHR), there have been several instances when detainees have been refused access to counsel, forced to sign confessions after being tortured, and left unable to contact family or friends.
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