Shaykh Nimr and the travesty of Saudi “justice”
The Saud family wants him dead, but there is still time for the world to find its conscience and take action.
Throughout modern history, mankind has collectively decided to prize certain rights and values above all others. Among the greatest of these is freedom of thought and expression, two of the most basic things that make us human. Although laws vary between countries, owing to cultural and regional considerations, some are treasured by everyone. Well, almost everyone.
“Disobeying and breaking allegiance to the ruler.” “Questioning the integrity of the judiciary.” “Calling for demonstrations.” In most modern nations, these are basic human rights. Under international law, these are considered protected under the right to free expression. If, however, you have the misfortune of being a Shi’i Muslim living in Saudi Arabia, these are criminal acts that can carry a death sentence.
The Saudi monarchy has long been a global exception, a savage child-of-a-regime allowed to sit at the adults’ table of civilized nations. Curiously enough, that’s just one of those things that happens when you’ve the thing everyone else needs: oil, and lots of it. When you’re the dealer peddling the global community’s favorite narcotic, you more or less get to set the terms of the relationship. It’s the primary reason that the rest of the global community keeps up its pretense of treating Saudi Arabia seriously as a nation state. It’s also the main motivator for that same community to let the Saudi regime get away with basically whatever it wants: the large-scale use of slave labor under the guise of “guest work,” the political suppression of minorities, torture, and murder — nothing’s out of bounds. (To say the Saudi ruling family “gets away with murder” is not even hyperbole.) And really, what else should the international community expect from a family so pathologically narcissistic as to name the country they govern after themselves?
Or, as Sayyid Mahdi al-Modarresi pointed out in a recent column, “It is a country so totalitarian, the whole nation is officially named after the family of Bedouins who came to rule it after a long, bloody conquest. To put that into perspective, imagine the US and UK were named Bushistan and Blairia!” Little wonder, then, that as far as the ruling family is concerned, they own the place and can do whatever the damned well please. It doesn’t help that the rest of the world is happy to abide so long as they continue to get their petrol fix.
This is a country that should be treated as a global pariah. Yet, in spite of an extensively documented range of human rights violations and abuses, “Saudi” Arabia continues to be treated like just any other country. Yes, we’re told, they have their quirks, but nobody’s perfect.
Forget perfect. The Saudi regime would be taking a momentous step in the right direction if they just aimed for being marginally evil instead of comically villainous. Consider their behavior until now:
- Women are banned from driving (the government has actually arrest 2 women who protested this issue publicly), and only just now gained voting rights
- Having uncomfortable links to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
- Exporting the Wahhabi ideology that forms the underpinning of ISIS
- Banning all political parties, workers unions, and independent human rights organizations (and arresting and imprisoning those who try to start or join one)
- Prohibiting all public gatherings and demonstrations since 2011
- Targeting human rights activists under anti-terrorism laws
- Imposing travel bans on political dissidents
- Invading Bahrain to help prop up its oppressive Sunni monarchy and put down a popular democracy movement led by the country’s Shi’i majority
- Committing war crimes, on an ongoing basis, in Yemen, including “indiscriminate attacks and the use of cluster munitions”
Lest one imagine that things will undoubtedly improve under the relatively new reign of King Salman — after all, how much worse could it get? — the outlook is still pretty bleak. By Human Rights Watch’s estimation, “King Salman largely has failed to improve his country’s human rights record during his first seven months as ruler.” More specifically, “Under Salman, Saudi Arabia has continued to execute people in record numbers, including nonviolent drug offenders; repressed pro-reform activists and peaceful dissidents; failed to take steps to protect the rights of foreign workers; and maintained its systematic discrimination against women and religious minorities.”
Although it only takes the faculty of sight combined with bottom-rung functional literacy to understand the sheer scope and scale the Saudi monarchy’s contempt for basic human rights and dignity — not to mention international law — the rest of the so-called civilized world barely bats an eyelash. The net result of this coddling and permissiveness is that the Saudi regime has become the spoiled kid of the international community: keenly aware it can do basically whatever it wants, free of meaningful scrutiny or serious consequence.
Take the case of cleric Shaykh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, the Martin Luther King, Jr. of Saudi Arabia’s Shi’i minority, who have long suffered religious, political, and economic disenfranchisement and discrimination. A vocal opponent of the Saudi regime and its repressive policies towards the Shi’a, Nimr advocated a campaign of non-violent resistance: “The [Saudi] authorities depend on bullets … and killing and imprisonment. We must depend on the roar of the word, on the words of justice,” said al-Nimr, in an October, 2011 sermon. Al-Nimr also stated, “The weapon of the word is stronger than the power of lead.”
In 2012, Saudi authorities — not known for their tolerance towards anything that smacks even remotely of dissent or criticism—arrested of al-Nimr on a host of bizarre and ambiguous charges, as part of a broader effort to suppress the movement for Shi’i rights in the country’s eastern provinces. In 2014, after a rigged trial that was roundly criticized by human rights monitors, Shaykh al-Nimr was convicted and sentenced to death. Shaykh Nimr has long been the voice of one of the world’s most oppressed religious minorities, the Shi’a of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In the Saudi regime’s book, that means he is “an instigator of sedition” (yes, apparently that’s a thing there). Each of the charges against al-Nimr are either in contravention of international law or wholly unsubstantiated. They include:
- “Disobeying and breaking allegiance to the ruler”
- “Questioning the integrity of the judiciary”
- “Calling for demonstrations”
- “Interfering in a neighboring state’s affairs”
- “Calling for the overthrow of the regime”
- “Meeting with and supporting wanted suspects”
- “Inciting sectarian strife”
Concerning this charges, the world’s most respected human rights monitor, Amnesty International, concluded:
Evidence for the charges that Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was convicted of came from religious sermons and interviews attributed to the cleric. Amnesty International’s review of these texts confirms that he was exercising his right to free expression and was not inciting violence. A number of charges, including disobeying the ruler, should not be offences at all as they criminalize the peaceful exercise of the right to freedom of expression and other human rights. Other charges are vague and have been abused here to punish the exercise of human rights.
In other words, al-Nimr was charged with calling for non-violent protest and resistance against an oppressive regime, meeting with local human rights activists, and supporting the rights and dignity of Bahrain’s brutally oppressed Shi’i majority.
Human Rights Watch, likewise, called the accusations against al-Nimr “a host of vague charges, based largely on his peaceful criticism of Saudi officials.” Joe Stork, the HRW deputy Middle East director, noted, “Saudi Arabia’s harsh treatment of a prominent Shia cleric is only adding to the existing sectarian discord and unrest,” adding that, “Saudi Arabia’s path to stability in the Eastern Province lies in ending systematic discrimination against Shia citizens, not in death sentences.” In fact, HRW has not only called for Saudi Arabia’s judicial council the throw out al-Nimr’s verdict, but has actually gone so far as to recommend the total abolition of the “Specialized Criminal Court” that tried and convicted him.
Al-Nimr’s trial, which began in 2013 and ended in 2014, was fatally flawed, according to Amnesty. The agency concluded that al-Nimr was “denied the most basic needs to prepare for his defense,” and detailed how “He was only allowed a pen and some paper to respond to the prosecution’s accusations after months of requesting them, and they were soon confiscated.” Yes, you read that correctly: if you’re on trial for your life in Saudi Arabia, even getting a pen and paper to mount your legal defense could take months, only to be confiscated shortly thereafter.
But that’s not all. In its press release after the verdict, Amnesty stated, “[Al-Nimr’s] lawyer was not informed of important trial dates, was prevented from talking to the media on trial proceedings and was forced to sign a pledge not to share court documents.” In other words, there was a total blackout on the trial proceedings, so much so that even the lawyer for the accused was not even informed of when to show up.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of al-Nimr’s story is its typicality. “Torture and other ill-treatment remained common and widespread,” said Amnesty International in their 2014/15 annual report on Saudi Arabia, “and were used with impunity. In a number of cases, courts convicted defendants solely on the basis of pre-trial ‘confessions’ without investigating their claims that these confessions had been extracted under torture, in some cases sentencing the defendants to death.”
After reading all this, surely one could be forgiven for sooner expecting a fairer trial in North Korea than in Saudi Arabia.
Since his conviction, al-Nimr has been subject to torture and abuse in prison, and denied regular access to family visitation. At any time the monstrous Saudi regime may carry out his death sentence. Tragically, though, the story does not end there. In September, 2015, Saudi legal authorities also upheld the death penalty in the case Ali al-Nimr, Shaykh Nimr’s nephew, who was only 17 at the time he was arrested, similarly charged, and tortured to extract a false confession.
As long as both Shaykh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr and the young Ali al-Nimr remain alive, there is still time for the world to stir to action. Those of us who live in North America and Europe are in unique positions to exert pressure on elected representatives to in turn exert pressure on the Saudi government. Public protests can be staged. The case can and should be raised in the media. Religious leaders across the faith spectrum can be educated and speak out. There are any number of avenues that can be pursued, but time is running out.
Finally, win or lose, the question should haunt us all: as long as we, the global community, allow the Saudi regime to exist, how many more al-Nimrs will there be?
