HRW Statement on Sweeping Injustices in Saudi Arabia

[Human Rights Watch logo. Image from hrw.org] [Human Rights Watch logo. Image from hrw.org]

HRW Statement on Sweeping Injustices in Saudi Arabia

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by Human Rights Watch on 31 January 2013.] 

Correction: On 21 January 2013, a Saudi higher court decided not to charge website editor Raif Badawi with apostasy. The pending charges against Badawi include “insulting Islam through electronic channels,” which does not carry the death penalty.

Saudi Arabia arrested hundreds of peaceful protesters during 2012, and sentenced activists from across the country to prison for expressing critical political and religious views, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2013.

Thousands of people are in arbitrary detention, and human rights activists were put on trial on politicized charges. The Ministry of Interior forbids public protests. Since 2011, security forces have killed at least fourteen protesters in the Eastern province who were seeking political reforms.

“The Saudi government has gone to considerable lengths to punish, intimidate, and harass those who express opinions that deviate from the official line,” said Eric Goldstein, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “These efforts have fueled rather than silenced the growing domestic calls for greater freedoms.”

In its 665-page report, Human Rights Watch assessed progress on human rights during the past year in more than ninety countries, including an analysis of the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. The willingness of new governments to respect rights will determine whether the Arab uprisings give birth to genuine democracy or simply gives way to authoritarianism in new clothes, Human Rights Watch said.

Among those imprisoned in Saudi Arabia during 2012 for exercising their right to free speech is the human rights activist Mohammed al-Bejadi, who is serving a four-year sentence in Riyadh for charges that include “setting up a human rights organization.” Ra’if Badawi, editor of a liberal website established to encourage debate on religious issues, has been detained since June and could face the death penalty for apostasy. In December, authorities arrested Turki al-Hamad, a prominent author known for his critical views, after he published a series of tweets calling for reform of Islamist teachings.

Saudi Arabia remains one of just three countries worldwide that continue to sentence child offenders to death. In early January 2013, authorities executed Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan domestic worker, for a murder she allegedly committed when she was seventeen years old, despite serious flaws in her trial.

The government passed limited reforms on women’s rights in 2012. The Labor Ministry issued four decrees waiving the requirement of a male guardian’s permission for women who work in clothing stores, amusement parks, food preparation, and as cashiers. However, the decrees reinforced strict sex segregation in the workplace, forbidding female workers from interacting    with men. Saudi schools provide no physical education for girls, and authorities allow no team sports for women. However, authorities allowed women to compete in the Olympics for the first time in 2012, and two women participated.

The country’s guardianship system requires women to obtain permission from male relatives to travel and conduct official business with the administration, among other activities.

Saudi Arabia has no penal code, which gives prosecutors and judges wide discretion to define criminal offenses. Lawyers are not generally allowed to assist suspects during interrogation, and face obstacles to examining witnesses or presenting evidence at trial. Authorities have used specialized criminal courts, set up to try terrorism cases, to prosecute a growing number of peaceful dissidents on politicized charges.

Saudi Arabia should urgently enact a penal code that limits punishable offenses to those that are recognizable under international norms, Human Rights Watch said. This would eliminate prosecutions on charges that judges define at their own discretion, and that have in recent years included offenses such as “witchcraft” and “disobedience of parents.”

Saudi laws also violate or fail to protect the rights of migrant workers.

“Women, migrant workers, and dissidents were among those who pay the price for Saudi Arabia’s arbitrary judicial system and its repressive laws,” Goldstein said.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412