Saudi supreme court upholds verdict against blogger Raif Badawi - 10 years and 1000 lashes for 'insulting Islam' // Sweden's foreign minister unrepentant over Saudi flogging row

By Dilip -
NB: This is a terrible and cruel punishment to a brave man who took a stand for intellectual freedom. The Saudi state is one of the most vicious and communal governments in the world, and next to Israel, the strongest Arabian ally of the Western powers. Yet we Indian leftists tend (mostly) to be silent about human rights in the Arabian / Iranian world. For some reason many leftists feel that conservative Islam is 'anti-imperialist'. The men and women in Iran and Arabia who fight for democracy and secular ideals are our comrades. They fight for the same ideals as us. Yet for all our slogans of 'internationalism' we fail to take a stand against Wahabism and Islamist fascism. We have paid and will continue to pay a heavy political price for this unprincipled silence. DS

 Sweden's foreign minister unrepentant over Saudi flogging row

 Saudi Arabia’s supreme court has upheld a sentence of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes against the blogger Raif Badawi on charges of insulting Islam, according to his wife. The judgment came despite worldwide outrage over his case and criticism from the United Nations, United States, the European Union, Canada and others. “This is a final decision that is irrevocable,” his wife, Ensaf Haidar, told AFP in a telephone interview from Canada on Sunday. “This decision has shocked me.”

Badawi received the first 50 of the 1,000 lashes he was sentenced to outside a mosque in the Red Sea city of Jeddah on 9 January. Subsequent rounds of punishment were postponed on medical grounds. Amnesty International slammed the “abhorrent” decision to uphold a “cruel and unjust sentence”,  describing it as a “dark day for freedom of expression”.

“Blogging is not a crime and Raif Badawi is being punished merely for daring to exercise his right to freedom of expression,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director. Badawi’s wife expressed fear that the implementation of the flogging sentence might resume next week. “I was optimistic that the advent of Ramadan and the arrival of a new king would bring a pardon for the prisoners of conscience, including my husband,” she said.

Badawi co-founded the Saudi Liberal Network internet discussion group. He was arrested in June 2012 under cybercrime provisions, and a judge ordered the website to be shut down after it criticised Saudi Arabia’s notorious religious police. The co-founder of the site, Souad al-Shammari, was released from prison in February. But Badawi’s lawyer, Walid Abulkhair, who is also a rights activist, is still in jail. Badawi and Abulkhair have been nominated for this year’s Nobel peace prize by a Norwegian member of parliament, Karin Andersen.

His supporters have launched a campaign on Twitter using the hashtag #backlash that has gathered momentum, and posted pictures of people with lashes drawn on their backs with red lipstick. In early March Saudi Arabia dismissed criticism of its flogging of Badawi and “strongly denounced the media campaign around the case”.

In his first letter from prison, published by the German weekly Der Spiegel in March, Badawi wrote how he “miraculously survived 50 lashes”. Badawi, 31, recalled that he was “surrounded by a cheering crowd who cried incessantly ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is greatest]” during the whipping. “All this cruel suffering happened to me because I expressed my opinion,” Badawi wrote.

Badawi’s wife and their three children have received asylum in Quebec, Canada. Quebec’s immigration minister, Kathleen Weil, said in March that her government would “continue its defence of Mr Badawi”, saying this was a “clear case of human rights violation”.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Canada, Naif Bin Bandar al-Sudairi, complained officially. “The kingdom does not accept any form of interference in its internal affairs and rejects ... the attack on the independence of its justice system,” he wrote in a letter to the Canadian government.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/07/saudi-supreme-court-upholds-raif-badawi-blogger-verdict

See also
Sweden vs Saudi Arabia
Sweden's foreign minister unrepentant over Saudi flogging row
Shoaib Daniyal - Saudi award for Zakir Naik
Saudi blogger's wife: I feel destroyed ...
Global outrage at Saudi Arabia as ...
To really combat terror, end support for Saudi Arabia...
Nesrine Malik - Saudi Arabia's human rights record ...
Meredith Tax - The Revolution in Rojava - A liberated area in the Middle East led by socialist-feminists is fulfilling the dreams of Arab Spring
AZEEM IBRAHIM - Why The West Is Losing The Battle Against Radical Islam
ZAHID HUSSAIN - Destruction of the past: Islamic State starts bulldozing the ancient Assyrian site of Nimrud
Deadly Fatwa: Iran's 1988 Prison Massacre

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