He has 30 days to appeal the sentence. “The fact that Ashraf Fayadh is facing the prospect of being beheaded only adds to the outrageousness of this court ruling”.
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“What we can not imagine is that the coalition be only a group of hyper-homogeneous countries”, he said.
After his arrest, the religious police found photos on his phone of him with several women who had participated in an exhibit in Jeddah he had curated. Mona Kareem, an activist from Kuwait calling for Fayadh’s release, said “some Saudis think this was revenge by the morality police”. In 2014, the reported number of executions was 90. “He said “they punch everybody in here”. He also stressed that his book Instructions Within, published a decade before, was not blasphemous, Human Rights Watch says.
Nowhere in the court’s second judgment did it state what Fayadh said that was allegedly insulting to God and religion. After initially being sentenced to 800 lashes and four years in prison, he was retried and on November 17 was sentenced to death.
“The justice ministry will sue the person who described … the sentencing of a man to death for apostasy as being “ISIS-like”, the newspaper Al-Riyadh quoted a source in the justice ministry as saying.
That was reversed after the prosecutor appealed the sentence.
His friends are now asking how the case could draw such different verdicts, especially when two of the three judges overseeing his case in the General Court of Abha in southwestern Saudi Arabia served in both the retrial and the initial trial.
“They were based on confessions extracted under torture, trials that barred them from accessing defense counsel, and judges that displayed bias towards the prosecution”.
“Repentance is a work of the heart relevant to matter of the judiciary of the hereafter; it is not the focus of the earthly judiciary”, the ruling said. The sentence must be approved by the appeals court and the Supreme Court.
“Beheading or otherwise executing dozens of people in a single day would mark a dizzying descent to yet another outrageous low for Saudi Arabia, whose authorities have continued to show stone-faced cynicism and even open defiance when authorities and ordinary people around the world question their sordid record on the use of the death penalty”, Lynch said.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty at all times and in all cases without exception – regardless of who is accused, the crime, guilt or innocence or method of execution. Capital punishment is unique in its cruelty and finality, and it is inevitably and universally plagued with arbitrariness, prejudice, and error.
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The publication earlier this week of an article in the newspaper Okaz, which has close links to the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, has convinced families of the accused and concerned human-rights organisations that the executions are imminent. “He’s a very good friend to major artists”, said Stephen Stapleton, founding director of the London-based Edge of Arabia, which promotes Saudi artists.
