Saudi Arabia has “weaponized [its] justice system to carry out a terrifying number of executions” this year, Human Rights Watch said in a new report.
From January through August, 241 people were executed, including 162 convicted of nonlethal, drug-related offenses, according to the rights group Reprieve. More than half were foreign nationals.
“The surge in executions is just the latest evidence of the brutally autocratic rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” said Joey Shea, HRW’s researcher on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Authorities executed 22 people in the first week of August alone, the fastest pace since March 2022, when 81 people were executed in a single day.
HRW said the government is using executions to silence dissent, citing the June 14 killing of journalist and blogger Turki al-Jasser, who had exposed corruption and human rights abuses linked to the royal family. Al-Jasser, arrested in March 2018, was the first journalist executed in Saudi Arabia since the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.
Al-Jasser was sentenced to death after the Interior Ministry accused him of various “terrorist crimes,” including “destabilizing the security of society and the stability of the state.”
Similar cases include the February 2024 execution of political analyst Abdullah al-Shamri and the 2023 death sentence for retired teacher Muhammad al-Ghamdi over peaceful online expression. Al-Ghamdi’s sentence was later reduced to 30 years in prison.
Prosecutors are also seeking the death penalty for prominent Islamic scholar Salman al-Awda and reformist thinker Hassan Farhan al-Maliki over their political statements.
“Behind closed doors, Saudi Arabia is executing peaceful activists and journalists following politicized trials,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, senior director for countering authoritarianism at the Middle East Democracy Center. “These state-sanctioned killings are an assault on basic human rights and dignity that the world cannot afford to ignore.”
