Saudi Arabia

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, has given us the opportunity of discussing human rights in Saudi Arabia today, and I congratulate him on his very forthright speech introducing the debate this evening. In spite of its egregious human rights record, it is seldom discussed on the Floor of the House. I looked back over the present Session and found only two occasions. The first took place when the noble Lord himself introduced a debate at Question Time in terms very similar to the one that we are having this evening; the second was introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, at the end of October. On that occasion, by the way, my noble friend Lady Falkner asked the Minister how the UK voted when Saudi Arabia was elected to the board of UN Women; the Minister has not yet complied with the undertaking to write to her on that matter. Perhaps he could tell us now, and at the same time explain how Saudi Arabia came to be a member of the UN Human Rights Council when human rights are non-existent at home.

The Foreign Office’s annual report on human rights and democracy shows that in Saudi Arabia the rule of law does not apply because judges apply their own interpretation of Sharia law, including their own arbitrary variations in punishments for the same offence. The death penalty is applied to many different offences, including sorcery, drug-smuggling, homosexuality and apostasy. Minors are not exempt, as we see from the case of the 17 year-old Sri Lankan housemaid, Rizana Nafeek, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of an infant left in her charge. Torture is widespread, but the FCO fails to mention the frequent use of the cruel and unusual punishment of flogging, as in the case of the Australian, Mansor Almaribe, who was on hajj when he was arrested and convicted of insulting companions of the Prophet and sentenced to 500 lashes and a year’s imprisonment, although he suffers from diabetes and heart disease and is very unlikely to survive that punishment. The US State Department gives details of reported cases of torture and flogging. Freedom of expression is strictly limited. Newspapers can be closed down without appeal. A journalist was sentenced to 50 lashes for reporting a protest against electricity price rises. There is absolutely no freedom of religion.

The Shia minority, which amounts to 20 per cent of the population, is severely repressed. Unfortunately, the FCO only devotes one short paragraph to this problem and gives no details. There is now major unrest among the 2 million Shia in the Eastern Province, and, as in Syria, demonstrators are being shot dead by the police. A 20 year-old student, Nasser al-Muhaishi, was killed on 21 November when live ammunition was used against demonstrators, also injuring a woman and a child. The young man’s body was not handed over to his family for burial, which triggered a further demonstration, during which another youth, Ali al-Filfil, was killed and seven others injured. After 70,000 took to the streets to protest against these killings, finally the bodies of the two young men were handed over, but, during the funeral processions, two more were killed, 26 year-old Abdullah Iqriris and 22 year-old Munib al-Adnan. Twelve further persons were injured, two of them critically. On 6 December, a group of 62 Saudi intellectuals issued a statement condemning the killings, holding the Government responsible, and calling for freedom of expression and an end to sectarianism. Now these human rights defenders are being threatened by the official media on the grounds that they are inciting violence and undermining national unity. I hope that my noble friend can say that we will condemn the use of lethal force by the authorities, as well as the use of torture against detainees and the arrests of thousands of political dissidents, which have been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed.

In April 2009, Bill Rammell MP, then Minister of State at the Foreign Office, wrote to me saying that we were,

“engaged with the Saudi Government to encourage their tolerance of, and respect for, the Shia community”.

Well, we have been singularly unsuccessful in this aim, because there is a constant stream of complaints from the Eastern Province about the prohibition on the building of mosques, arbitrary arrests of leading community dignitaries, raids on private houses where the Shia meet for prayer, and the prohibition on Shia worshippers joining in prayers at Sunni mosques.

As we have already heard, women are allowed to work only in a very few occupations, and then only with other women. All women are subordinate to a male relative, contrary to an undertaking given by Saudi Arabia to the UN Human Rights Council that it would abolish the male guardianship system. Girl children can be married off at the age of 12. I expect that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, will have seen the report in the Sunday Telegraph a week ago about the cleric who said that if women were allowed to drive, they would be “driven to lust”. The highest religious council chipped in and said that it would be the end of virginity in the country, and a young mother convicted of persistently flouting the ban on women drivers was sentenced to 10 lashes in Jeddah in September in spite of the king's promise to grant her a pardon.

Anti-Semitism is rife and foreign workers, of whom there are almost 8.5 million in the kingdom, are often the victims of violent abuse by their employers, who enjoy almost total impunity. The FCO says that this issue is raised frequently with the Saudi Government, the Shura Council and the media, but it has nothing to say about the success or otherwise of all these representations. The FCO appears to think that we can alleviate the horrendous violations reported in its annual report and covered in far more detail and more effectively in the State Department equivalent, by remonstrations and cosmetic bits of aid which are supposed, for example, to encourage reforms at the Ministry of Justice, promote discussion in the Shura Council on the minimum age of marriage and adulthood, and to sponsor talks about the regulation of foreign workers’ rights.

If the Saudi Government had the political will, they could perfectly well undertake these initiatives themselves. It is not at all clear whether any of the glacially slow reforms that are actually or potentially occurring are in fact accelerated by the UK’s initiatives. On the contrary, it could be that the authorities play along with our no doubt well meaning attempts to influence them in the direction of human rights and democracy as a means of averting stronger criticism of the kind they have to put up with from human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. It would be very interesting if my noble friend the Minister could say something about the incongruity of spending UK taxpayers’ money on these puny initiatives when the Saudi hereditary dictatorship is rolling in billions of dollars of oil money. I would also like to hear from my noble friend what the Government’s attitude is to the use of those billions to fund the Salafist ideology which is being promulgated in mosques and madrasas throughout the Arab world and in south Asia that are the mainspring of terrorism and the indirect cause of the deaths of hundreds of British servicemen in Afghanistan. This ideology which sanctions the use of violence against all who think differently is the reason why the Christians of the Middle East are being squeezed out of the region, as the most reverend Primate said in your Lordships’ debate on Friday. He might have added that they are being squeezed out of Pakistan and other Islamic countries as well.

However, not only Christians are under fire throughout the Islamic world. Last Wednesday, 55 worshippers, celebrating the festival of Ashura, were killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul, while in the Pakistani city of Lahore, 93 worshippers at two separate Ahmadiyya mosques were murdered in terrorist attacks in May 2010. Dozens of assassinations of persons belonging to minority Islamic sects as well as attacks on their places of worship have been reported in recent years and yet there has been hardly any attempt to examine the ideological sources of terrorist movements such as al-Qaeda or al-Shabaab, or even to analyse the literature being used in the madrassahs where the leaders of these movements were educated. I would like my noble friend to say what the FCO is doing, together with the European Union and others, to counter the hate-filled propaganda which motivates terrorists and to expose those who are funding it.

Finally, I request my noble friend to use whatever influence we have with the Saudi regime to persuade it to withdraw its troops from Bahrain, where they are propping up another hereditary despotism. In 1956, when the Hungarian Communist Party invited Soviet troops in to quell unrest, the international community rightly decided that it was a breach of the UN charter. The same verdict was passed on Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1958, and on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which followed an invitation by President Babrak Karmal. These incursions were violations of Article 2(4) of the UN charter because the Governments of the states concerned were manifestly not representative of their people, and the same is true of the situation in Bahrain. The Saudi troops there may have been used solely to guard critical installations but in so doing they released the local security forces to attack and murder demonstrators and to arbitrarily arrest and torture thousands of Bahraini citizens.

The Saudi regime cannot last indefinitely, any more than the dictatorships of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt or Syria. The ideal would be a managed transition over a period to a constitutional monarchy, or an elected shura with legislative power, and a Government of the majority with the right to appoint Ministers. However, if that is going to happen, I think it will be as a result of internal and regional forces and not because of the worthy but ineffectual attempts to reconcile Wahhabi absolutism with international norms of human rights and democracy. Whatever influence we do have should be directed towards preventing the spread of the pernicious ideology of the Saudi clerics to the rest of the Islamic world.