RIYADH – Saudi Arabia defend the country’s criminal justice system whenfacing criticism by international media outlets, United Nations humanrights bodies, and human rights organizations. On August 4, 2017, SaudiArabia’s Ministry of Justice spokesperson said, “The Kingdom of SaudiArabia’s courts are independent courts that work—in accordance with theBasic Law of Governance—to apply Islamic law rulings and follow procedurallaws that govern the course of trials and provide fair trial guarantees forall defendants.”
The practice of Saudi justice, however, which largely followsinterpretations of uncodified Islamic law, does not measure up to suchdeclarations, and over a decade of reforms have not appreciablystrengthened the safeguards against arbitrary detention or ill-treatment,or enhanced the ability of Saudi and non-Saudi defendants to obtain fairtrials.
The defects in the criminal justice system are especially acute for thetwelve million foreigners living in Saudi Arabia, over one-third of thecountry’s total population, who face substantial challenges obtaining legalassistance and navigating Saudi court procedures. At 1.6 million people,Pakistanis make up the second-largest migrant community in Saudi Arabia,most of whom travel to the country as foreign migrant workers.
This report is based on interviews with twelve Pakistani citizens detainedand put on trial in Saudi Arabia in recent years, as well as seven familymembers of nine other defendants. All interviews took place in Pakistanwith the exception of two telephone interviews with Pakistani inmates inSaudi prisons. Researchers interviewed these individuals between November2015 and September 2016. Interviews were conducted in Urdu and Punjabi. Thecriminal cases involved 21 total defendants in 19 separate cases thatranged from minor crimes such as petty theft and document forgery toserious offenses, including murder and drug smuggling, which are oftencapital offenses in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi criminal justice system tramples the rights of Pakistanidefendants to due process and fair trials.
Nearly all the Pakistani detainees, former detainees, and their familymembers described widespread due process violations by the Saudi criminaljustice system and Saudi courts, including long periods of detentionwithout charge or trial, no legal assistance, pressure to sign confessionsand accept predetermined prison sentences to avoid prolonged arbitrarydetention, and ineffective or pernicious translation services fordefendants.
Due process violations were most consequential for defendants involved inserious cases such as drug smuggling and murder. In Saudi Arabia, judgesapply a 1987 ruling by the country’s Council of Senior Religious Scholarsprescribing the death penalty for any “drug smuggler” who brings drugs intothe country, as well as provisions of the 2005 Law on Combatting NarcoticDrugs and Psychotropic Substances, which prescribes the death penalty fordrug smuggling. The law allows for mitigated sentences in limitedcircumstances.
Saudi Arabia executes more Pakistanis than any other foreign nationalityannually, nearly all for heroin smuggling, including 20 in 2014, 22 in2015, 7 in 2016, and 17 in 2017.
Of the 21 Pakistanis involved in criminal cases, 15 faced drug-relatedcrimes and authorities charged 11 with bringing in drugs at aninternational airport. Of the eleven individuals, Saudi courts have giventhree men death sentences, four individuals had prison sentences rangingbetween fifteen and twenty years, one had a prison sentence of four years,and three remained on trial.
According to family members, drug traffickers in Pakistan forced underthreat of violence four of the eleven individuals to serve as “drug mules.”The family members stated that courts were not interested in thecircumstances under which individuals brought drugs into the country anddid not attempt to investigate or appear to take into account claims ofcoercion during sentencing.
In all the non-death penalty cases, judges did not afford defendants anadequate opportunity to mount a defense. Interviewees said that duringtheir first court hearings Saudi judges presented them with predeterminedconvictions and sentences based solely on police reports and askeddefendants to accept the rulings and sentences.
If they chose to dispute the ruling, the courts permitted defendants tosubmit a written defense, but nevertheless the courts repeatedly summonedthem for additional hearings in which judges presented the samepredetermined rulings, leaving detainees with the impression that notaccepting sentences would mean indefinite pretrial detention.
Five of the Pakistani defendants accepted the rulings during their firstcourt hearing, and all of the others eventually accepted the originalrulings merely to halt what they believed would be indefinite pretrialdetention and get out of prison as soon as possible. As one detaineestated: “The judge had our case files in front of him. He passed oursentences without listening to our stories.”
Nine of the 21 defendants said that court officials pressured them to givetheir agreement to court rulings through confessions or stamping the rulingpapers with an inked copy of their fingerprints (taken as a sign ofconsent) without affording them the opportunity to read, review, or fullyunderstand these judgments. One detainee deported in 2014 said that heaccepted a conviction on charges of alcohol consumption and fighting afterthe judge told him verbally that his sentence was 10 days and 80 lashes,which he considered acceptable. He said he was later shocked to discoverthat the sentence also ordered his deportation, and he said he would havechallenged it had he known this. He pleaded with justice officials to takeback the decision to no avail.
With one exception, none of the 21 Pakistani defendants in these trials hada defense lawyer largely because they did not have the resources to locateor pay a lawyer while in prison. Largely due to this lack of legalassistance, only the one detainee had possession of court documents orcopies of their convictions. Some of the detainees and family members saidcourts would not provide these documents while others said they did notrequest them.
Four of the detainees said that court-appointed translators did not provideadequate services, sometimes intentionally misrepresenting detainees’statements to judges or failing to accurately describe the contents ofArabic-language court documents. Three defendants said that court-appointedtranslators misrepresented their statements to judges, which they were ableto understand having learned limited Arabic living in Saudi Arabia. Theysaid that translators told judges that defendants were pleading forforgiveness while they were actually disputing the charges or conviction.
Seven of the former detainees said that they remained in prison up to eightmonths following the expiry of their sentences for various reasons,including apparent negligence by prison officials and slow processing ofdeportation procedures.
In addition to due process violations, some of the Pakistani detainees andtheir family members described poor prison conditions during theirdetention, including overcrowding, unsanitary facilities, lack of beds andsheets, as well as poor provision of medical care. One former detaineedescribed his detention experience in the southern province Jazan: “It wasovercrowded and the conditions of the prison were deplorable. Often therewas no water for days and there was no proper sewage system. The bathroomswere so unhygienic and filthy that we dreaded using them.”
Two former detainees and one current detainee said that Saudi prisonauthorities had subjected them to ill-treatment, including slapping,beating with a belt, and shocking with an electrical device duringinterrogations. The family member of another detainee said that authoritieshad beaten her husband with “sticks” following his detention.
Under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which Saudi Arabiaratified in 1988, it has an obligation to inform Pakistani consularofficials when they arrest a Pakistani citizen. Under article 36 of theconvention, “…the competent authorities of the receiving State shall,without delay, inform the consular post of the sending State if, within itsconsular district, a national of that State is arrested or committed toprison or to custody pending trial or is detained in any other manner.” Inthe cases Justice Project Pakistan and Human Rights Watch reviewed,however, it did not appear that Saudi officials informed Pakistani consularofficials about the arrests of the Pakistani citizens, and the burden toinform Pakistani authorities largely fell on detainees and family members.Justice Project Pakistan wrote to Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairsofficials about all of the Pakistani detainees they learned about but didnot receive any response to their inquiries. Furthermore, Justice ProjectPakistan researchers said that the family members they interviewedgenerally did not know which government agency to contact when theirrelatives were arrested in Saudi Arabia.
Based on interviews conducted with former detainees, current detainees, andfamily members of detainees, most of the Pakistanis did not seek consularservices from the Pakistani embassy in Riyadh or consulate in Jeddah at anypoint during their detentions because they did not believe Pakistaniofficials would offer any assistance and they did not want to waste limitedmoney on such phone calls. They said that Pakistani officials rarely ifever visited Saudi prisons, unlike representatives of other countries. Fourof the defendants who did contact Pakistani embassy officials said they didnot provide any assistance other than deportation processing proceduresfollowing prison sentences. Only one of the defendants, who is currentlyserving a 20-year sentence for drug smuggling, said he met with a Pakistaniconsular official during his trial. – HRW