On 22 March 2022, during the UN Human Rights Council (HRC)’s 49th Regular Session, ALQST, International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) and the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) delivered a joint oral statement addressing the persistent pattern of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. 

The statement, which can be read in full below, highlights the renewed repression in Saudi Arabia in 2021, including fresh waves of arbitrary arrests, harsh sentencing of peaceful critics, and deliberate attempts to place the lives of prisoners of conscience at risk. It also highlights the spike in executions carried out in 2022 so far, including the mass execution of 81 individuals on 12 March, and renews the call for the Council to establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia.

During the HRC session (taking place from 28 February to 1 April), a number of states have also condemned Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, including the extensive use of capital punishment, the recent mass execution, and intensified airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen since the non-renewal of the mandate of the UN Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts on Yemen in October 2021. 

Joint statement 

Thank you, Mr. President.

This is a joint statement. 

Since the last UN Human Rights Council joint statement on human rights in Saudi Arabia in September 2020, the situation in the country has deteriorated.

Although a number of high-profile women human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience were conditionally released, they remain under severe restrictions which mean that they are not yet free. 

Furthermore, as documented by ALQST for Human Rights, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, and other NGOs, the Saudi authorities resumed their habitual pattern of abuses with renewed intensity throughout 2021. This includes: 

• Ongoing arbitrary arrests and detention of people peacefully exercising their fundamental rights;  
• Cases of deliberate medical and administrative neglect leading to deaths in detention, including the murder in jail of Musa al-Qarni in October 2021;
• Lengthy prison sentences handed down to numerous peaceful critics for exercising their basic rights, including a 20-year sentence for humanitarian worker Abdulrahman al-Sadhan; and 
• 67 individuals executed during the year, more than twice as many as in 2020, and over 90 individuals have been executed in 2022 alone, following the mass execution of 81 men on 12 March.

Saudi Arabia has refused to address the repeated calls by UN Special Procedures and over 40 States at the Council in March 2019, September 2019 and September 2020, demonstrating its lack of political will to genuinely improve the human rights situation and to engage constructively with the Council. Based on objective criteria, we reiterate our call on the Council to establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia.