As the world’s attention remains fixed on the latest developments in the war in Iran, Saudi Arabia has quietly proceeded with the execution of a prominent businessman, Saud al-Faraj, for his involvement in the 2011 anti-government demonstrations in Qatif, where protesters had called for greater democracy and reform.
Al-Faraj was arrested in 2019 following a violent, warrantless raid on his home, carried out without explanation. His family was taken alongside him. He was then deliberately misled into believing they remained in custody, a calculated psychological tactic used to extract confessions. Transferred blindfolded and forced to sign documents whose contents were never disclosed to him, his arrest marked not an end but a beginning: the start of a prolonged and systematic pattern of abuse.
He was subjected to enforced disappearance, denied legal representation, and tortured into confessing. He was charged with calling for and participating in protests, communicating with human rights organizations, and belonging to a terrorist organization. In 2022, a court used that forced confession to sentence him to death.
Human rights organizations appealed repeatedly on his behalf, and the UN Human Rights Council Working Group on Arbitrary Detention published an opinion declaring his detention arbitrary and calling for his release. None of it was enough. He was executed following a royal order.
In announcing his death, the Ministry reinforced a narrative that has accompanied the Kingdom’s mounting executions over the past year: that they are part of a broader effort to maintain security, achieve justice, and implement what it described as the rulings of Islamic Sharia against those who transgress against the innocent.
Indeed, over the last 12 months, the government broke its own record for executions, putting more than 350 people to death in a single year. The majority were carried out under the banner of the so-called “war on drugs”, yet most cases rested on no real evidence, or on evidence obtained through illegal means, police violence, and torture.
Saud al-Faraj attended protests, spoke to human rights workers, and asked, as many did in 2011, for something better. He spent the years that followed disappeared, tortured, and stripped of every legal protection afforded to him. Then he was killed. Whatever the Ministry’s language around security and Islamic Sharia is meant to convey, his case makes one thing difficult to argue against: that the 356 executions carried out this past year were not an expression of justice, but of power.
