UN rights experts urge Saudi Arabia to halt six imminent executions

United Nations human rights experts have called on Saudi Arabia to stop the imminent execution of six people sentenced to death for activities related to a wave of anti-government protests in 2011 while they were under the age of 18.

According to Press TV, the UN experts said in a joint statement on Monday that the six men were sentenced to death for alleged crimes that actually amount to the “criminalization of the exercise of fundamental rights, including freedom of assembly and expression.”

The experts, who include Agnes Callamard, the UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary Executions, said that since the individuals were minors at the time of alleged offenses, imposing the death penalty on them runs counter to international law and would amount to “arbitrary executions.”

They said the men were also subjected to torture and ill-treatment, and were “forced to confess, denied adequate legal assistance during trial and never had access to an effective complaint mechanism.”

The six were named as: Ali al-Nimr, Dawood al-Marhoon, Abdullah al-Zaher, Mujtaba al-Sweikat, Salman Qureish and Abdulkarim al-Hawaj.

“As a State Party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Saudi Arabia is under an obligation to treat everyone under the age of 18 as a child,” the statement said. “Children should never be subject to the death penalty, this practice violates an existing norm of customary international law and renders the punishment tantamount to torture.” 

Ali al-Nimr - who was sentenced to death over his alleged role in anti-regime protests in 2012 when he was 17 years old, is the nephew of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a Saudi cleric who had called for reforms and was executed in January 2016.

Those protests were part of the Islamic Awakening movement, a series of uprisings and revolutions that started across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 against dictatorship, unemployment, inflation as well as corruption, among other things.

ME