Ali Mohammad al-Nimr was 17 years old when he was arrested by Saudi Arabian authorities for his participation in Arab Spring protests led by the kingdom’s Shia minority in 2011. Three years into his imprisonment, courts have sentenced him to be beheaded and have his corpse publicly displayed. The sentence has garnered outcry from foreign leaders, international rights’ organizations, and the young man’s family, but Saudi officials have rebuffed their attempts at intervening on behalf of al-Nimr.
“I feel that one’s very being is repelled at such a ruling,” al-Nimr’s mother, Nusra al-Ahmed, told the Guardian. “It’s backwards in the extreme. No sane and normal human being would rule against a child of 17 years old using such a sentence. And why? He didn’t shed any blood, he didn’t steal any property. Where did they get it [this sentence]? From the dark ages?”
She believes that Saudi courts sentenced her son to death due to her family’s faith and activism. Al-Nimr’s uncle, a prominent Shia cleric and political dissident, was sentenced to death by courts in the Sunni-majority state last October.
An annual death penalty study conducted by Amnesty International found that Saudi Arabia executes more people than almost any country in the world. In fact, the country averages one execution every two days, according to a report on the country’s criminal justice system that the rights’ organization released in August.
The kingdom executed more than 100 people in the first half of this year alone. In violation of international human right standards, almost half of all the death sentences meted out by Saudi officials were for non-lethal offences — many of them drug-related.
“In many cases defendants are denied access to a lawyer and in some cases they are convicted on the basis of ‘confessions’ obtained under torture or other ill-treatment in flagrant miscarriages of justice,” Said Boumedouha of Amnesty International said.
That’s what al-Nimr’s family and Saudi rights’ activists say happened to him.
“The lawyer didn’t supply the court with any documents because he wasn’t allowed to meet Ali in the prison, not because of court but because of the prison,” Waleed Sulais, a Saudi human rights’ activist said. “The judge issued a letter to the prison that the prison must allow the lawyer to meet Ali, but every time he went to the prison to meet Ali he was refused.”
Al-Nimr’s mother said that her son may also have been tortured in prison.
“When I visited my son for the first time I didn’t recognize him,” she said. “I didn’t know whether this really was my son Ali or not. I could clearly see a wound on his forehead. Another wound in his nose. They disfigured it. Even his body, he was too thin.”
She called on President Barack Obama to urge Saudi Arabia to pardon her son.
More than 2,000 people have signed a petition calling for Obama to negotiate the release of al-Nimr. So far, the administration has remained largely silent on the case. State Department spokesperson Mark C. Toner said that he was not aware of the sentence against al-Nimr at a press conference last month.
“[W]e believe that any kind of verdict like that should come at the end of a legal process that is just and in accordance with international legal standards,” he said, but could not point to any specific progress that Saudi Arabia had made to improve its human rights record.
Foreign officials, including the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, have raised the issue of al-Nimr’s execution with Saudi leaders and Prime Minister David Cameron said that he would attempt to do so personally as well.
Saudi Arabian officials, however, have not appreciated the input from foreign governments on al-Nimr’s case.
Abdallah al-Mouallimi, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the BBC as much in an interview on Friday.
“We respectfully request the world to respect our systems and our judicial processes, and our laws and regulations, and not to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign state,” he said. “We believe that we are holding ourselves to the highest standards. If that doesn’t please someone here or there, that’s their problem not ours.”
The Saudi Arabian Embassy in the U.K. made the same point just days before al-Mouallimi’s interview.
Press Statement: #SaudiArabia rejects any form of interference in its internal affairs. #AliAlNimr pic.twitter.com/AYBBAlI0Hw
— Saudi Embassy UK (@SaudiEmbassyUK) October 7, 2015
The resistance of Saudi Arabia to international critique of its human rights’ record despite its strong relationship with the U.S. and U.K. has long been a concern to international advocacy organizations. Their concerns only mounted, however, when the kingdom was elected to the top position in the U.N.’s Human Rights Council last month.
“It is scandalous that the U.N. chose a country that has beheaded more people this year than ISIS to be head of a key human rights panel,” Hillel Neuer of U.N. Watch said following the announcement.
Leaked diplomatic cables revealed that the U.K. supported Saudi Arabia’s bid for the Human Rights Council position. The cables, which were passed to Wikileaks, also showed that Saudi Arabia transferred $100,000 to the U.K. for “expenditures resulting from the campaign to nominate the kingdom for membership of the human rights council for the period 2014–2016.”
On Tuesday, the U.K. announced that it was withdrawing its bid for a contract worth several million dollars to deliver training to Saudi Arabia’s prison system. The move came on the same day that Cameron said he called on Saudi authorities not to carry out a sentence of 360 lashes on a British man who was caught transporting homemade wine in the country.
Advocacy organizations are asking on the U.K. to use its influence with Saudi Arabia to call for al-Nimr’s pardon, which would be rare, but without precedent.
“The king and the government [of Saudi Arabia] do absolutely have the power to pardon Ali,” Kate Higham of the advocacy organization Reprieve said in a statement emailed to ThinkProgress.
Doing so, she said, would “show that Saudi Arabia is serious about the commitments it’s made under the Convention of the Rights of the Child, the Convention against Torture” — just two of the U.N. agreements that it is supposed to help enforce in its role at the U.N. Human Rights Council.