Convictions against Palestinian Detainees in Saudi Arabia are Unfair and Politicized
In the strongest terms, the “Together for Justice” organization condemns the harsh convictions issued by a Saudi court against a number of Palestinian and Jordanian detainees in the kingdom, despite the lack of material evidence proving their involvement in the crimes raised against them.
We affirm that these unfair and arbitrary verdicts were issued by a judicial system that lacks integrity, following politicized trials that lacked minimum standards of justice, during which detainees were denied their right to legal representation or to defend themselves.
The Specialized Criminal Court, or as it is known as the Terrorism Court, had issued its rulings convicting most of the Palestinian and Jordanian detainees detained in Saudi Arabia, whose numbers exceed 60.
The convictions against the detainees, a few of whom were known, were as follows:
Mohamed Al-Abed (22 years imprisonment), Mohammed Al-Banna (20 years imprisonment), Abdel Rahman Mohamed Farhana (19 years imprisonment), Ayman Al-Arian (19 years imprisonment), Mohamed Abu Al-Rub (18 years imprisonment), Sherif Nasrallah (16 years imprisonment) Jamal Al-Dahoudi (15 years imprisonment), Omar Aref Al-Hajj (12 years imprisonment), Essam Al-Sharif (10 years imprisonment), Ahmed Abu Jabal (8 years imprisonment), Nabil Safi (8 years imprisonment), and Mohamed Al-Fatafta 6 months, Mohamed Qafa (8 years imprisonment), Bassem Al-Kurdi (7 years imprisonment), Maher Al-Halman (6 years imprisonment), Saleh Qafa (5 years imprisonment), Mashhour Al-Sada (five and a half years imprisonment), Ayman Ghazal (4 years imprisonment), Musa Abu Hussein (4 years in prison), Jamal Abu Omar (3 years in prison), Tariq Abbas (3 years in prison), and Tariq Al-Sawafiri (3 years in prison).
The Saudi judiciary also sentenced the detainee, Mohamed Al-Khudari, who is over eighty years old and suffers from cancerous tumors to 15 years in prison amid complete deprivation of all basic rights. His son Hani was sentenced to 3 years in prison.
These rulings, in addition to their lack of sound legal foundations, and their reliance on flimsy evidence and confessions extracted under torture, threats, and extortion, can only be understood that they directly serve the interests of the brutal Israeli occupation that has been afflicting the Palestinians for more than seventy years. The Israeli occupation and support for Palestinian families were affected by the practices of the occupation forces.
We call on the international community to intervene and pressure the Saudi authorities to rescind these provisions and drop the charges against the Jordanian and Palestinian detainees immediately, and to form an urgent committee to visit Saudi Arabia and examine the conditions of the detainees and take quick and decisive steps to ensure that they all obtain all their human and legal rights.
