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On Thursday, New-York based Human Rights Watch urged Saudi Arabia to release two citizens held in the kingdom without trial for two years for their religious beliefs.
33-year-old Sultan al-Anzi and 35-year-old Saud al-Anzi had converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim religious group, an offshoot if Islam which is banned in the uber-conservative Sunni kingdom. The two were arrested and jailed in May 2012 for refusing to abandon the faith they had joined three months earlier, Human Rights Watch said. The group had urged Saudi king Abdullah to release the two in August 2012, but had never received a response.
Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson said, “Not only have Saudi authorities interfered with the personal beliefs of these two men, but they’ve left them sitting in jail for two years in legal limbo with no end in sight. The kingdom’s repression of religious dissidents stains its human rights record. Saudi Arabia needs to stop policing people’s personal beliefs. King Abdullah has won acclaim for preaching religious tolerance abroad, but there apparently is no room for tolerance inside his own country”.
Saudi authorities had detained the two on charges of apostasy in the city of Arar. Under the Saudi legal system, apostasy is punishable by death. According to the Human Rights Watch, Ahmadiyya activists have had no contact with the two men since the arrest, and have no knowledge of their condition or their whereabouts. According to the Interior Ministry’s online database, the two men are in detention and are “under processing to move to bureau of investigation”.
According to the Human Rights Watch, by holding the men for two years without charge, Saudi officials have violated their own criminal procedure law, which require prosecutors to either charge or release any suspects within six months of detention. The group added that the Freedom of Belief is a basic human right inscribed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Arab Charter of Human Rights, a legally binding treaty Saudi Arabia acceded to in 2009.