Saudi Arabia: Rampant executions fuelled by justice system 'riddled with holes'
- Death sentences imposed after unfair trials lacking basic safeguards
- At least 102 executed in first six months of 2015 compared to 90 in all of 2014
- Average of one person executed every two days, most by beheading
- Almost half of executions in recent years are for non-lethal crimes
- At least 2,208 people executed between January 1985 and June 2015
- Nearly half of those executed since 1985 were foreign nationals
- Juvenile offenders, people with mental disabilities among those executed
Hundreds of people have been condemned to death after being convicted
in unfair trials under Saudi Arabia’s deeply flawed judicial system,
said Amnesty International in a new briefing published today.
'Killing in the Name of Justice': The Death Penalty in Saudi Arabia
exposes the shockingly arbitrary use of the death penalty in the
Kingdom, where the death sentence is often imposed after trials that
blatantly flout international standards.
“Sentencing hundreds of people to death after deeply flawed legal
proceedings is utterly shameful. The use of the death penalty is
horrendous in all circumstances, and is particularly deplorable when it
is arbitrarily applied after blatantly unfair trials,” said Said
Boumedouha, Acting Director of the Middle East and North Africa
Programme at Amnesty International.
“Saudi Arabia’s faulty justice system facilitates judicial executions
on a mass scale. 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.”
