Academic Ali Al-Juhani: Four years without trial

“Together for Justice” organization renewed its call to the international community, including institutions, governments, and civil society organizations, to urgently intervene to pressure the Saudi regime to release prisoners of conscience who have been detained inside Saudi prisons for years, while being subjected to degrading treatment and poor conditions of detention.

The most prominent prisoners of conscience in Saudi Arabia are the “detainees of the September 2017 campaign” launched by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a few months after becoming the country’s de facto ruler, and instead of implementing his promises of reform, enlightenment and progress, he decided to eliminate all dissidents or anyone calling for reform, including scholars, thinkers, advocates, activists, and academics, as well as businessmen and a number of members of the royal family.

One of the victims of this campaign is the university professor, thinker, and academic Ali Hamid Al-Juhani, who today, September 14, completes four years of incommunicado detention, or being able to appoint a lawyer to defend him.

Moreover, the authorities did not announce the reasons for his arrest or the official charges raised against him, and till this very moment, no one knows whether he had been tried or not.

Ali Al-Juhani, a professor at the Islamic University of Madinah, is among a list of 83 detainees of men and women, who were arrested by the authorities in September 2017, and despite the release of very few of them, most of them are still in prisons suffering from inhuman conditions and degrading treatment, in addition, distortion campaigns launched by media outlets affiliated to the Saudi regime.

We at “Together for Justice” join all the free voices calling for the Saudi regime to adopt civilized and humane behavior and to release all political detainees, opinion holders, and opponents.

We affirm that these detainees are the essence and valued assets of the nation, whose places should never be in prisons.

We call on the international community to take a strict position on the illegal practices of the Saudi regime and to stop any security, military, and economic cooperation with it as long as it refuses to improve the human rights situation in the country.