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A Saudi court has sentenced a man to death based solely on his Twitter& YouTube activity.
Repression has reached a terrifying new stage when a court can hand down the death penalty for nothing more than tweets. Saudi authorities should quash the verdict.
hrw.org/news/2023/08/2…
Repression has reached a terrifying new stage when a court can hand down the death penalty for nothing more than tweets. Saudi authorities should quash the verdict.
hrw.org/news/2023/08/2…
On July 10, 2023, the Specialized Criminal Court, convicted Muhammad al-Ghamdi of several criminal offenses related solely to his peaceful expression online. The court sentenced him to death, using his tweets, retweets, and YouTube activity as the evidence against him.
Al-Ghamdi’s brother is a known Saudi scholar and govt critic exiled in the UK. On Aug 24, Saeed wrote on Twitter that the “false ruling aims to spite me personally after failed attempts by the investigations to return me to the country.”
Saudi authorities in recent years have increasingly retaliated against the family members of critics and dissidents abroad in an effort to coerce them to return to the country, Human Rights Watch said.
Court docs cite two X platform accounts as belonging to al-Ghamdi. Human Rights Watch found that the first account had two followers and the second had eight.
Both accounts, which have fewer than 1,000 tweets combined, largely contained retweets of well-known critics of govt.
Both accounts, which have fewer than 1,000 tweets combined, largely contained retweets of well-known critics of govt.
The court docs say the court issued the sentence on the grounds that the crimes “targeted the status of the King and the Crown Prince,” & that the “magnitude of his actions is amplified by the fact they occurred through a global media platform, necessitating a strict punishment.”
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