Greetings, Mr. President.
Given recent media reports that you would be visiting Saudi Arabia and meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, we write to voice our great concern. Attempts to repair the United States’ relationship with the Saudi government without a genuine commitment to prioritize human rights are not only a betrayal of your campaign promises, but will likely embolden the crown prince to commit additional violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.
We encourage your administration to obtain true human rights improvements before intervening in a way that elevates the crown prince and his regime, which consistently and callously violates the rights of its own residents, as well as Americans and others across the world.
Mr. President, throughout your campaign, you stated that your administration will work to make Saudi Arabia “the pariah that they are,” and that “they must be held accountable.” Indeed, a congressionally mandated report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that was declassified by your administration in 2021 pointed to responsibility for the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the highest levels of the Saudi government, including Mohammed bin Salman. Despite this, little progress has been made toward accountability for his death or any of the other injustices committed by the Saudi regime.
The crown prince’s administration continues to arbitrarily detain, torture, and execute a large number of people, in violation of their internationally guaranteed right to a fair trial and due process. Human rights defender Mohamed al-Rabea has been arbitrarily detained since 2018; humanitarian aid worker Abdelrahman al-Sadhan has been sentenced to 20 years in prison and a 20-year travel ban for his tweets and is unable to communicate with his family or lawyers; prominent scholar Salman Alodah has been held in solitary confinement for nearly 5 years, and his charges are related to his public support for imprisoned dissidents; and physician Dr
These are only a handful of the innumerable casualties of the kingdom’s assault on nonviolent activism and free expression. Meanwhile, despite assurances to the contrary, mass executions have increased in recent years, with 81 people murdered on a single day on March 12, 2022, and more people subjected to state-sanctioned homicides already in 2022 than in 2020 and 2021 altogether.
These violations are part of a pattern of behavior that is rapidly being recognized as a worldwide danger to human rights and security. The Saudi government has been accused of using criminal malware to eavesdrop on nonviolent dissidents, journalists, and human rights campaigners both at home and abroad. The government also appears to have monitored its citizens’ movements in the United States by taking advantage of flaws in the worldwide mobile telecommunications network. Walid Fitaihi, Badr al-Ibrahim, Aziza al-Yousuf, and Salah al-Haidar, all US citizens and legal permanent residents, are still subject to unjust travel prohibitions and are unable to rejoin with their families in the US. Saudi Arabia also used state hostage-taking to silence dissidents; Omar and Sara al-Jabri, the children of former intelligence head Saad al-Jabri, have been imprisoned for more than two years despite being just 17 and 18 at the time of their detention.
Meanwhile, the Saudi government is drafting laws and implementing policies that they tout as historic and progressive, but which are frequently limited and not subject to public scrutiny. For example, the Family Code, which the crown prince praised as “encompassing in resolving all the difficulties that the family and women were suffering from,” actually codifies existing forms of inequality, such as male guardianship over women. Additionally, incarceration and travel bans, particularly those imposed on women’s rights activists such as Loujain al-Hathloul and Nassima al-Sadah, have chilling effects on activism and civil society, making it hard to promote or monitor human rights.
Despite these persisting worries, senior Saudi and US officials have met several times in recent weeks. A visit by the US president, however, should not take place unless significant progress is made to address some of the most serious human rights violations. We encourage you to insist on the following as a requirement for any meeting with the Saudi crown prince and to improve the bilateral relationship:
- All political prisoners identified in the 2021 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices must be released immediately: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
- Lifting arbitrary travel bans imposed on human rights campaigners and others, including those imposed on US citizens;
- The cessation of illegal monitoring and state hostage-taking, as well as the release of all persons arrested for these reasons;
- The abolition of male guardianship over women, as well as the repeal of all discriminatory laws and practices, allowing women’s rights advocates to comment on and monitor developments;
- A halt to all executions;
- A pledge to keep the cease-fire in Yemen in place.
Sincerely,
Washington Center for Human Rights.