Saudi Arabia Sentences Poet to Death

Saudi Arabia has executed more than 150 people so far this year, according to Human Rights Watch.

Raeda Fayadh insists her younger brother Ashraf, 32, who faces execution as an apostate, is a believing Muslim and innocent of any wrongdoing.

Fayadh’s father, Abdul Satar Fayadh, told media that his son was arrested in August 2013 after he had a dispute at a coffee shop in the Saudi town Abha while watching a soccer game. The religious police went to the café after a man reported that Fayadh had made obscene comments about God, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Saudi state. The court only began assessing the book a year ago after the man who filed the complaint against him also mentioned his poetry to the religious police.

The religious police held him for a day, then released him, but authorities re-arrested him on January 1, 2014.

Fayadh was charged with blasphemy, spreading atheism and having an illicit relationship with women and storing their pictures in his phone, according to HRW. Sure, they say, perhaps some of the laws on the books may look similar to the punishments in the extremist organization, but the Saudi kingdom is a sovereign state that abides by the rule of law and uses these punishments with discretion.

Hossein Amirsadeghi, the editor of the book Art & Patronage: the Middle East, says: “We should protest from the highest pillars of morality-this bloodiness and religion has become unbearable; religion is a personal journey, not something that should be used to herd people as sheep”.

Fayadh was initially sentenced to four years in prison and 800 lashes, but an appeal judge this week increased the sentence, handing down the death penalty.

Mr Fayadh, a member of British-Saudi art organisation Edge of Arabia, was sentenced to death on 17 November, in a verdict that has prompted renewed condemnation of Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights.

That was reversed after the prosecutor appealed the sentence.

“Repentance is a work of the heart relevant to matter of the judiciary of the hereafter; it is not the focus of the earthly judiciary”, the ruling said. Amnesty International has campaigned for their death sentences to be quashed, because of credible allegations they were tortured and had grossly unfair trials at the Specialized Criminal Court, which is used in counter-terrorism cases. The sentence must be approved by the appeals court and the Supreme Court.

But in crimes of “hadd”, even the Saudi king cannot issue a pardon, though he can interject if there are questions around how the case was handled, according to Coogle and Fayadh’s friends who are familiar with the case.

The Arab nation carries out more executions than nearly any other country on earth, with the favoured method of death being beheading.

“Saudi Arabia’s macabre spike in executions this year, coupled with the secretive and arbitrary nature of court decisions and executions in the kingdom, leave us no option but to take these latest warning signs very seriously”.