Zero-tolerance for criticism in Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on expression

Saudi authorities have adopted a zero-tolerance policy for any criticism, no matter how innocuous. They have shuttered all human rights groups, wiping out any form of independent civil society in the Kingdom.  

People are being sentenced to some of the harshest prison terms we have ever documented in Saudi Arabia for expression – others have been sentenced to death.  

Salma al-Shehab, a PhD student and mother of two arrested during a visit to Saudi Arabia from the UK, is serving a 27-year sentence just for tweeting in support of women’s rights. 

Mohammad al-Ghamdi was sentenced to death in July of 2023 for criticising authorities on Twitter to a follower count of 10.  

Many expression cases are tried by the notorious Specialized Criminal Court (SCC), which is meant to try terror-related crimes, but has been used as a weapon to silence dissent. The SCC hands out harsh sentences after flagrantly unfair trials to human rights defenders, activists, journalists, religious clerics and ordinary people. 

Buying the world’s silence with an image laundering campaign  

In 2017, the Saudi Information Ministry announced a global campaign “to promote the changing face of Saudi Arabia to the rest of the world and improve international perception of the kingdom”.  

PR experts were hired to peddle an illusion of progress and reform and counter negative media coverage of the country. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, which is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, built a multibillion-dollar foothold in the entertainment, sports, and tech industries.   

Businesses, sports and entertainment figures rushed to take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s financial bounty. Forgetting their earlier human rights condemnations, world leaders rolled out the red carpet for the Crown Prince. 

Meanwhile, the human rights situation in the Kingdom has deteriorated exponentially. As well as their zero-tolerance policy to criticism, in 2022 the Saudi authorities executed 196 people and at least 172 people in 2023, despite promises by authorities to limit the use of the death penalty. The 2022 number is the highest annual number of executions that our researchers have recorded in the country in the last 30 years. 

Right now, there are at least seven young men at imminent risk of execution, who were sentenced to death for alleged crimes committed when they were children. One of them was as young as 12 years old at the time of his alleged crime. 

A ‘Manifesto for Repression’ 

In February 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced a package of legislative reforms that aim to “preserve rights, protect human rights” and “bolster the principles of justice”. This included the Kingdom’s first ever set of criminal laws defining crimes and punishments in a penal code. Until now, in the absence of a penal code, judges can define crimes and hand down sentences at their discretion without resorting to a legal text, resulting in discrepancies in punishments for the same crime.  

A draft of the penal code leaked online in July 2022 tells a different story. Our analysis shows that it is a manifesto for repression. Here is what it does: 

• It codifies the use of the death penalty as a primary punishment for a range of crimes, not limited to intentional killing as international standards dictate.  
• It punishes freedom of expression and fails to protect the rights to freedom of association and peaceful assembly.  
• It criminalizes “illegitimate” consensual sexual relations, same-sex relations, and restricts access to abortion by criminalizing both the acts of undergoing an abortion or aiding in performing an abortion.  
• It fails to protect women and girls from gender-based violence by allowing perpetrators of crimes in the name of “honour” to escape criminal prosecution. 
• It fails to clearly define all crimes and punishments, allowing judges wide latitude in determining what constitutes a crime and its appropriate punishment. 

Codifying discrimination against women

Another promised law, passed in March 2022, also fails to deliver on the promise of reform. The Personal Status Law codifies discrimination against women in most aspects of family life, including marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance, and perpetuates the male guardianship system.

It fails to adequately protect women from domestic violence. Instead, it entrenches patriarchal gender roles by expecting women to “obey” their husbands and makes women’s financial support from their husbands during marriage conditional on wives “submit[ing]” themselves to their husbands, placing women at risk of exploitation and abuse.  

Exploitation of migrant workers

Additionally, despite introducing limited reforms in 2021 to the labour system governing the millions of migrant workers in the country, our researchers documented how migrant workers contracted to warehouses in Saudi Arabia were subjected to serious abuses which likely amounted to human trafficking for the purposes of labour exploitation, including by:

• being deceived by recruitment agencies about the nature of their employer and the terms and conditions of their jobs before leaving their home countries,
• having their wages withheld by third-party contractors,
• being housed in dirty and overcrowded accommodation,
• subject to verbal or physical abuse or threats thereof particularly when they raised complaints about their living and working conditions. 

All of these changes are taking place in a context in which free speech is severely restricted and any critical discussion or public debate on the reforms or their human rights impact is criminalized. 

For more information on the impact of these legislative reforms on human rights, and our recommendations of what a rights-respecting penal code should look like , read our report.