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
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
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