Public Comment

New: Torture & Killings

Tejinder Uberoi
Monday July 17, 2017 - 06:05:00 PM

On his first trip abroad, Trump was feted by the Saudis who regaled him with a huge weapons contract and effectively silenced him about concerns for human rights.

Following President Trump’s visit, a Saudi criminal court upheld several death sentences handed down to protesters.

The country is set to execute 14 men including Mujtaba who was only 17 when he was sentenced to death five years ago. Another member of the group is Munir al-Adam, who is half-deaf and partially blind.

Saudi Arabia has one of the highest executions in the world. Prisoners are often brutally tortured into making false confessions and convicted in secret trials.  

 

Confessions resulting from torture are inadmissible under international and Saudi law. As many as 40 percent of the people executed in Saudi Arabia are for nonviolent offenses. In recent months, there has been a massive uptick in executions and death sentences for nonviolent protests. One of the victims, Ali al-Ribh, was dragged out of school, tortured, forced to confess and then executed at a secluded spot. His family never saw him again. ISIS and Saudi Arabia share the same grotesque ideology. How quickly we forget, 15 of the 19 hijackers on 911 were from our great ally, Saudi Arabia. How much longer can we afford to abandon our cherished values of promoting human rights and democracy so easily in pursuit of trade deals which often results in selling weapons of mass destruction to the head chopping merchants of death?