Rights group blasts "sham justice" for Saudi terrorism suspects

Aug 10, 2009, 12:17 GMT

Riyadh - Saudi authorities have indefinitely detained more than 9,000 people in the past six years and convicted hundreds more in 'sham' trials, a US-based human rights organisation said Monday.

The New York-based pressure group Human Rights Watch accused the Saudi domestic intelligence agency of indefinitely detaining thousands, including some 'peaceful political dissidents,' and criticized them for offering religious 're-education' instead of a judicial process.

'Justice has to be fair and must be seen to be fair,' said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. 'The closed, summary Saudi trials are neither - they are sham justice.'

The Saudi Ministry of Justice in July announced that the Special Criminal Court in Riyadh had convicted 329 people for terrorism offences, with sentences ranging from fines to the death penalty.

The charges were in connection with four attacks against residential compounds in Riyadh that together killed 51 people and wounded 419 in May and November 2003, and with an April 2004 attack on a commercial building in Riyadh that left five dead and 148 wounded.

Those trials were secret, and the convicts had no access to lawyers, the rights organisation said.

Human Rights Watch criticized the United States and Britain for cooperating with the Saudi domestic intelligence agency, which it said 'acts as if it was above the law,' and for praising Saudi Arabia's religious re-education programme while remaining silent about the indefinite detention of thousands of people.

'The authorities made believe that religious counseling could replace trials, and now they are pretending that convictions after secret trials can legitimize continued detention,' Whitson said.

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International made similar charges last month.

'Unjust anti-terrorism measures have made an already dire human rights situation worse,' Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme, said at the time.

'The Saudi Arabian government has used its powerful international clout to get away with it. And the international community has failed to hold the government to account for these gross violations.'