Poor foreign workers bear the brunt of ”the stark horror” of Saudi Arabia’s secretive death penalty system, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, with a Saudi citizen up to eight times more likely to escape execution through a ”blood money” payment than a foreigner.
Foreign nationals, mostly Asians and Africans, who face capital trials in the conservative kingdom are frequently unable to understand court proceedings if they are not Arabic speakers, are often not represented by a lawyer and are routinely held for long periods in harsh conditions and coerced into false confessions.
”Poor foreign workers are literally paying with their lives when accused of capital crimes in Saudi Arabia,” said Amnesty International’s United Kingdom director Kate Allen. ”Frequently bamboozled by secretive and unfair trials conducted in a language they don’t even understand, they go to their deaths with little assistance from their home countries and little mercy from a grossly unfair Saudi justice system.”
The Saudi authorities do not provide statistics on the use of the death penalty but Amnesty recorded at least 1 695 executions between 1985 and May 2008. Of these, 830 were foreign nationals and 809 Saudis (with the nationality of 56 unknown). Foreigners make up about a quarter of the country’s population of 28-million.
Executions are currently carried out at an average of more than two per week, most by beheading and many in public. Two beheadings last Sunday brought to 74 the number carried out this year. Last year a record 153 people were executed, compared with 37 in 2006. The previous record, of 113, was in 2000.
Saudi Arabia is one of the few states in the world with a high rate of executions for women. It is also one of the few to execute people for crimes they committed when they were still under the age of 18.
The kingdom applies a strict version of Sharia law, under which rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking can all carry the death penalty. Part of the reason for the rapid rise in executions, Amnesty shows, has been an extension of the use of the death penalty in the late 1980s to cover ”corruption on Earth” (sometimes applied to political activities) as well as drugs-related offences.
Amnesty found that foreigners are at a severe disadvantage during trials compared with Saudis and lack the cash or the contacts to negotiate pardons via ”diya”, or ”blood money”, arrangements.
”The death penalty is not only applied unfairly and in a secretive manner,” says Amnesty. ”It is discriminatory and is sued against those who are least able to access their rights. It is little more than a macabre lottery whose consequences, for many, are lethal.”
The report shows that one pardon has been given for every four executions of Saudi nationals compared with just one for every 30 executions of foreign workers.
The cases researched included executions for adultery, apostasy and for what was officially described as ”sorcery” and ”witchcraft” by an Egyptian man. Most of those executed have been Pakistanis.
Six Somalis who were publicly beheaded in 2005 had been arrested in 1999, convicted for robberies and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and flogging. Neither they nor their relatives were aware of their death sentences. The men only discovered that they were to be killed on the morning of their executions. — guardian.co.uk