Annual report Sanad Human Rights Organization 2023 Missing Justice & Human Rights Violations in Saud Arabia
Annual report Sanad Human Rights Organization 2023 Missing Justice & Human Rights Violations in Saud Arabia
Human rights situation in the Kingdon of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has been witnessing a continuous deterioration for several years. The authorities there continue to practice a systematic policy against freedoms and rights, increasing suppression of freedom of expression, exclusion of dissenting voices, detention of activists and human rights defenders, and violations against the rights of women and minorities.
Annual report Sanad Human Rights Organization 2023
Improving human rights file in KSA is important not only for Saudis, but also for the international community. Empowering human rights, public participation, and respect for freedoms and rights are basic conditions for prosperity, peace, stability, and development.
The Saudi government is trying to improve its distorted image through sportswashing and misleading cross-continental propaganda by hosting global sporting events or investing in international sporting entities to hide its real image of human rights violations.
Annual report Sanad Human Rights Organization 2023
Despite the challenges, Sanad Human Rights Organization (Sanad) remains committed to its values and approaches to achieving its goals of lobbying to improve the human rights situation in KSA, documenting cases of violations, and communicating with human rights bodies, international organizations, and legal entities in the world to unveil the state of freedoms and rights in the country. Sanad also defends human rights and political detainees. Sanad aims to be the voice for the oppressed and persecuted in Saudi Arabia. In this context, Sanad issues its annual report for 2023, which highlights human rights violations in KSA.
Sanad monitored the continued cases of arbitrary detention in KSA against all voices calling for justice, coinciding with vicious cases of violations such as solitary confinement and torture inside detention centers. In addition to its lack of the most basic humanitarian standards and international laws in cases of detaining individuals, KSA prisons deprive detainees of the necessary medical care, the right to attend the funerals of their first-degree relatives and uses unofficial prisons for detention.
Sanad also documented a worrying increase in execution rates in KSA during 2023. According to human rights and journalistic sources, executions in Saudi Arabia reached 170 cases, compared to 147 cases in 2022 The Saudi government also uses the death penalty as a tool for political blackmailing, threatening it to oppress those who express their opinions, or to take revenge against relatives of activists, as happened in the case of Muhammad Nasser Al-Ghamdi.
Sanad observed the continuation of grave judicial violations against detainees, which included failure to release those whose sentences had expired, issuing new sentences against them without legal justification, approving charges extracted under torture, and holding secret trials without legal guarantees which makes the trials apart from justice. The basis for the Saudi judiciary issuing charges against detainees, that were not mentioned by the public prosecution, is an extremely dangerous transgression that confirms the lack of independence of the judiciary authority.
This report highlights the Human Rights situation in KSA for the current year, and the level that human rights situation has deteriorated to during 2023.
