More Than 180 Executions Since January 2025: Saudi Arabia’s Killing Spree Exposes the Hollow Rhetoric of Reform

Saudi Arabia’s authorities have shattered every previous record by carrying out over 180 executions in the first six months of 2025 alone, according to figures released by the Ministry of Interior. The soaring death toll lays bare the regime’s systematic use of the death penalty as an instrument of terror and censorship, contradicting every promise of restraint and judicial reform made by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS).

Among the victims stands journalist Turki bin Abdulaziz al-Jasser. Government agents abducted al-Jasser on 15 March 2018 after unmasking him as the voice behind a Twitter account that criticised official corruption and repression. Held incommunicado, tortured, and denied legal representation, he was convicted in a secret hearing on charges of “high treason” and “harming national security”. On 14 June 2025 the state executed him without prior notice to his family, marking the first known instance in modern Saudi history of a journalist put to death solely for peaceful online expression. His case symbolises the regime’s determination to silence dissent through lethal force.

With this year’s tally, Saudi Arabia now ranks second worldwide—behind only Iran—in confirmed executions. Drug-related offences, which the authorities had temporarily removed from capital punishment in 2020, once again dominate the docket. Political prisoners, peaceful protesters, and defendants convicted after grossly unfair trials are being led to the scaffold at a rate approaching one every 24 hours. Foreign nationals comprise a large share of those beheaded or shot, highlighting the discriminatory character of this campaign.

These killings flatly contradict MbS’s 2018 pledge that executions would be reserved for “the most limited cases” and subjected to “stringent conditions”. They also expose as fiction the royal decree of 2020 that purported to abolish the death penalty for people who were minors at the time of the alleged offence. In practice, juvenile defendants continue to face death sentences rebranded under other legal provisions, while dozens of capital crimes—from apostasy to sorcery—remain on the books despite repeated assurances that the list would be pared back.

The Saudi regime is wielding the death penalty to instil fear, crush free speech, and polish its image through bloodshed disguised as justice. Empty slogans about “Vision 2030” and “modernisation” cannot conceal the reality that scores of people—journalists, demonstrators, teenagers, migrant workers—have been executed after secret hearings that would be unrecognisable as trials in any independent court.

We therefore:

• Demand an immediate moratorium on all executions and the commutation of existing death sentences, beginning with those imposed for non-violent offences or the exercise of fundamental freedoms.
• Urge the United Nations Human Rights Council to establish an independent investigative mechanism with a mandate to examine every death-penalty case since 2015, including allegations of torture and forced confessions.
• Call on Saudi Arabia’s allies and trading partners to suspend security cooperation, impose targeted sanctions on officials responsible for unlawful executions, and make diplomatic and economic engagement conditional on measurable progress toward abolition.

The right to life and the right to speak one’s mind are not bargaining chips. Until Riyadh halts this killing spree and aligns its laws with international human rights standards, every execution will stand as further proof that the Saudi regime’s reforms are nothing more than calculated propaganda written in blood.