#FreeWaleed, a human rights lawyer jailed for speaking out
By Thor Halvorssen and Celine Assaf Boustani
Today in Saudi Arabia, the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated human rights lawyer and activist Waleed Abulkhair sits in a jail cell. He is finishing the third year of a 15-year prison sentence fraught with physical and psychological torture. At the hands of prison guard, Abulkhair has been beaten, deprived of sleep, denied food and medication for his diabetes, and completely isolated from the outside world. He is not even allowed to read a newspaper, and has been completely silenced.
In the United States, a 15-year prison sentence is reserved for those who engage in such heinous crimes as sex abuse and murder. In Saudi Arabia, Abulkhair received this punishment for tweeting, signing petitions and speaking up against the regime’s abuses.
In 2014, Abulkhair went online to condemn the Saudi government for silencing his fellow activists, including his client Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years of imprisonment. The Specialized Criminal Court quickly charged Abulkhair with “harming the reputation of the Kingdom,” and “inciting public opinion against the Kingdom.” He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which the regime extended to 15 years when he refused to apologize for his actions.
Waleed Abulkhair was the first activist to be charged under Saudi Arabia’s 2014 “terrorism law,” which grossly expanded the state definition of terrorism to include “any act intended to insult the reputation of the state, harm public order, or shake the security of society.” The law fails to define exactly what these acts are; instead, the regime has used this broad language to criminalize free expression and dissent against the monarchy.
The Saudi regime has consistently punished its citizens for exercising their right to free speech. Currently, the royal family directly controls most newspapers and media broadcasts, isolating and cracking down upon independent voices that speak against the government’s use of arbitrary detentions and torture.
Saudi Arabia’s anti-activist legislation directly contradicts its stances on the world stage. The regime currently holds a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and is a state party to numerous human rights treaties. These include the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which Saudi Arabia signed in 1997, and claims to support even as its police beat and starve activists like Abulkhair.
Furthermore, the Arab Charter on Human Rights, which the Saudi government ratified, guarantees the right to freedom of thought and opinion. As of February 2017, the Saudi judiciary has convicted at least 20 prominent activists and dissidents since 2011 for exercising this very right.
In 2012, the activist Ali Al-Nimr, only 17 years old at the time, was arrested and sentenced to death by beheading and crucifixion for “encouraging pro-democracy protests” using a Blackberry. His sentence, which was based on a confession forced through torture, still awaits ratification. In February 2016, a 28-year old man was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheist beliefs on Twitter.
And yet the country has received very little condemnation from the international community. Saudi Arabia won re-election to the UNHRC in November, even as Abulkhair and countless other activists languished in state prisons for exercising the very rights the Council is meant to protect. U.K. prime minister Theresa May has actively ignored the Saudi Arabian regime’s rights record and war crimes in order to sell more fighter jets. The United States’ newly-appointed Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, famously refused to identify the Saudi Arabian regime as a human rights violator, instead highlighting the “progress” that the regime has made. According to NGOs like Freedom House, the only “progress” has been an increase in the number of detained activists and shuttered human rights organizations.
Why does Saudi Arabia get a pass for such heinous breaches of human rights? Politicians have been quick to condemn Syria for its attacks on its own citizens, and to chastise Turkey for its crackdown on a free and open press. But Saudi Arabia provides the West with huge amounts of fossil fuels. American, British, and French refusals to condemn Saudi Arabia — and the rest of the world powers’ complete silence — sends a very clear message to activists: authoritarianism, torture, arbitrary detention, and other such abuses will be excused if their perpetrators can offer economic benefit to the West.
For political prisoners like Abulkhair, this global apathy creates an environment of hopelessness, benefitting the kingdom. The regime’s use of torture and isolation in its prisons is meant to break not only the dissenter, but dissent itself. Physically and psychologically harming activists until they have no choice but to sign false confessions, or to renounce their activism entirely, ensures that nobody will speak in the first place.
Abulkhair has signed no confessions, issued no apologies, and renounced no values. Instead, he has encouraged activists and NGOs worldwide to keep on speaking and to keep on fighting. When world leaders fail to protect the rights of their citizens, Abulkhair says citizens must take matters into their own hands.
Every #FreeWaleed protest sign, tweet, and signature sends a message to authoritarians everywhere: “We are here, we are heard, and we will not be silenced.”
To express its solidarity with Waleed Abulkhair, the Human Rights Foundation has launched a petition asking King Salman to release Abulkhair from prison. Sign today and HRF will include your name in our plea to the Saudi government to #FreeWaleed.
