Saudi authorities have freed many individuals serving long prison sentences for exercising their rights peacefully, but they still imprison and arbitrarily detain numerous others, Human Rights Watch reported.
Accounts from families and human rights groups show that between December 2024 and February 2025, at least 44 prisoners were released by Saudi authorities. Some of those released include Mohammed al-Qahtani, a 59-year-old human rights activist; Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University doctoral student; and Asaad al-Ghamdi, a brother of a high-profile rights activist in exile. HRW urges the Saudi Arabian government to put an end to its blanket repression of freedom of association, expression, and belief.
Released detainees remain subject to prohibitions. It includes arbitrary travel bans and the wearing of an ankle monitor. Detainees who remain in detention for the exercise of basic rights continue to experience systematic denial of fair trial rights and due process. It was reported by their lawyers and family members. Saudi authorities continue to jail and detain individuals based on freedom of expression, assembly, association, and belief.
Human Rights Watch stated that these releases do not suggest a significant policy change. Numerous individuals continue to be imprisoned for peacefully exercising their rights.
Al-Qahtani, the co-founder of Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, was released on January 7. On March 9, 2013, he was convicted by Saudi authorities of “establishing an unlicensed organization” and “spreading false information to foreign parties.” And was sentenced to 10 years in prison and a 10-year travel ban. Al-Qahtani was due for release in 2022 but had been held beyond his release date and forcibly disappeared for two years and 10 days, Saudi human rights group ALQST said.
Most of them are still jailed in Saudi Arabia on unrecognizable crimes under international law. Some are individuals, such as Sabri Shalabi, a psychiatrist wrongly accused of terrorism, prominent human rights activists such as Waleed Abu al-Khair and Manahel al-Otaibi, and the families of political dissidents such as al-Ghamdi.
In other instances, Saudi authorities have doubled their efforts and widened their abuses against human rights defenders. Among the others who remain detained are al-Otaibi, a Saudi fitness trainer, who was forcibly disappeared on December 15. She was permitted to phone her sister on March 16, a relative informed Human Rights Watch. She had been detained in Riyadh in November 2022 for backing women’s rights on X, the previous Twitter, and sharing photos of herself without an abaya, a loose, long-fitting robe that Muslim women wear, on Snapchat, the relative explained.
Human Rights Watch persists in chronicling pervasive abuses within Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system, such as prolonged detention without charge or trial, obstruction of access to counsel, use of torture-stained confessions as the exclusive grounds for conviction, and other pervasive violations of the right to due process and fair trial.
Saudi Arabia does not have a legislative penal code, and a pending penal code will have to abide by international human rights law, Human Rights Watch urged. Saudi authorities make use of overbroad, imprecise provisions of counterterrorism law as a tool of silencing criticism and persecution of religious minorities. The law invades due process and right to a fair trial by providing far-reaching powers for the arrest and detention of individuals without judicial review.