Ibrahim Al-Yamani: Medical Negligence and Mistreatment for his Reform Activities
The Saudi academic and jurist Ibrahim Hayel Al-Yamani is still behind bars for the fourth year. He was charged with trumped-up crimes, while the reality for his detention is his calls for societal reform and the promotion of democratic principles, which are prohibited by the current regime in Saudi Arabia.
Al-Yamani holds a Ph.D. in Criminal Legislation and a master’s degree in Jurisprudence. He is a faculty member at Taibah University, a legal advisor at the same university, a former member of the appeals committee in the municipal elections, a former mufti at the Prophet’s Mosque, and a former faculty member at “Mohammed Bin Saud”.
Ibrahim Al-Yamani was among the scholars, thinkers, and academics who were included in the repressive arrests campaign launched by Mohammed bin Salman in September 2017 against the Saudi elites in all fields, including businessmen and a number of members of the royal family.
Al-Yamani was first brought before a court in September 2018, a year after his arrest, and during his interrogation sessions, he was subjected to psychological and physical torture and forced to confess to the charges raised against him.
Since then, all of Al-Yamani’s court sessions have been held in secret, like the rest of the detainees in that campaign, without the presence of any impartial monitoring body, and even without his lawyer, thus depriving him of his legal right to self-defense or assigning a representative to do so.
Over the course of those sessions, the Public Prosecution demanded that the most severe penalties be imposed on the detainees in these cases, and even demanded the execution of a large number of them, without providing evidence that they had committed any crime or disclosing the nature and details of those crimes.
Ibrahim Al-Yamani suffers from very harsh detention conditions, as he is deprived of his most basic rights, and due to the Corona pandemic, the majority of detainees have been deprived of contact with the outside world or receiving visits from the family, in addition to exposing him to medical negligence, which contributed to the deterioration of his health.
Furthermore, he is being beaten and tortured brutally, sometimes leaving him with severe injuries that are difficult to live with, as happened about two years ago when prison warders beat him, resulting in a broken metatarsal.
In 2019, Al-Yamani’s father died, and despite the demands for his temporary release to attend his father’s funeral, despite the fact that Al-Yamani has not been convicted yet, and according to the law, he is still in pre-trial detention, as there is no evidence that he not been proven that he committed any crime to be punished for.
We demand the immediate and unconditional release of the detainee Dr. Ibrahim Al-Yamani and the rest of the prisoners of conscience who were being held in Saudi prisons in harsh living conditions for using their legitimate right to express their opinion which does not match with the regime, but it certainly aims at reform and development.
