Human Rights (Saudi Arabia)

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Westminster Hall

[Stewart McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered human rights in Saudi Arabia.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I want to make it clear at the outset that I am Stewart Malcolm McDonald; to my right is my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald), whose constituency and first name are entirely different. We are not to be confused.

At just 31 years old, Mr Raif Badawi is currently in a Saudi prison following a sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment, 1,000 lashes and a fine of over 1 million riyal. His “crime” is that he dared to speak out for secular liberalism and to question the authoritarian rule of his country. It is no crime at all. Raif Badawi’s case has captured the hearts and minds of people right across the world—not only because of the brutal and medieval sentence that has been bestowed on him, to which I will return, but because his writings represent the values of freedom and progress that inspire so many across the world.

Human progress takes great strides forward when our ability to think, write, argue and present our ideas in an open discourse is honoured. However, Mr Badawi is being made to fight that battle with his life. Throughout history, people have had to do the same—fight the forces that want to keep silent those of us who believe in liberal progress. Artists such as Salman Rushdie, who is a personal inspiration, thinkers such as Galileo, political leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi, feminists such as Emmeline Pankhurst and gay rights activists such as Harvey Milk—all of them fought for liberal progress and free thinking in order to advance humankind. All of them did so in the face of severe hostility, the threat of imprisonment or sometimes even death.

Raif Badawi and his fearless writings on human rights will surely join those great names in our history books, but he cannot join them just yet: he is too young and still has too much to offer our world and the cause of progress. He also still has too much love to give to and receive from his family. Raif’s wife, Ensaf, and his three children, Terad, Najwa and Miriyam, do not deserve to be robbed of their husband and father. Each and every time I see the photograph of Raif and his three beautiful children, who are happily wrestling for their father’s love, I am haunted to my core. What must they think of their father? What must they think of their country—of the world they live in and their future place in it? I secured this debate not only to give Raif some hope that people in this country and across the world are working to ensure his freedom, but so that his children know that their daddy’s freedom matters to this House and to people across the world, and that we will not stop until they are reunited with him.

The sentence that has been delivered is deliberately evil. Not content with a prison sentence and a fine that he could never hope to pay, the wicked Saudi regime had to go one further: 1,000 lashes to the back. Although the lashes have now been stopped, I want to illustrate the suffering endured by those who receive a lashing. Dr Juliet Cohen, head of doctors at Freedom from Torture, has said:

“When the cane strikes, the blood is forced from the tissues beneath... Damage to the small blood vessels and individual cells causes leakage of blood and tissue fluid into the skin and underlying tissue, increasing the tension in these areas… The more blows are inflicted on top of one another, the more chance of open wounds being caused. This is important because they are likely to be more painful and at risk of infection, which will cause further pain over a prolonged period as infection delays the wounds’ healing”.

The Saudi regime literally wants to whip Mr Badawi into obedience, believing that to discipline his mind, it is necessary to discipline his body. Although the involvement of doctors has halted the lashes for now, just consider the position a doctor is put in when assessing Mr Badawi’s wounds. The most fundamental guiding principle for any medical professional is that they shall not inflict harm. If a doctor were to declare that his wounds had sufficiently healed, they would do so in the knowledge that they would be sentencing him to another round of the most wicked punishment that he could endure—except he cannot endure it. Make no mistake: Raif Badawi has been served the slowest and most barbaric of death sentences.

More widely, Saudi Arabia is not known for its sympathy towards human rights of any sort or for its balanced approach to criminal justice. It does not matter whether someone is a liberal blogger, a human rights activist, a woman, a gay man or woman, or from a religious or ethnic minority. Last year alone, Saudi Arabia beheaded 90 people; this year, that figure had already been matched by the end of May. It is almost as though the regime has been caught off guard by the new kids on the block, Daesh, and is trying to show them who is top dog in the region when it comes to tyranny.

I want to compare our response to Raif Badawi’s case with our response to the death cult Daesh, which is making the headlines today. We have rightly condemned Daesh for the barbaric way in which it has swept across the middle east and how it has lured young people from this country and others to fight a fanatic’s war, something that has even touched my constituency, but—let us not beat around the bush—everything that Daesh has learned, it has learned from the barbaric regime of Saudi Arabia. The difference is that one group of fanatics has a state and the other has yet to be so successful.

If Daesh had a state to govern, do the Government really think that its forms of punishment would be any different from those being used in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia today? Why do we show these people—these fanatics—such respect? Why do we lower our flags when their dictator dies? Why have we become so deferential, almost submissive, when it comes to publicly shaming them—something that the Government freely do with countries such as North Korea or Iran?

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend think that the refusal to condemn the use of the death penalty might be something to do with the fact that, according to The Economist’s ranking, after China and Iran, only Iraq stands between Saudi Arabia in the United States in terms of executions?

[Stewart McDonald]

My hon. Friend makes my point for me. I was going to put it much more simply: the answer is money. While the Saudi Government value life so cheaply and lash their way to supreme authority over their people, our Government have no problem in doing serious amounts of commerce with them. Not only is Saudi Arabia our largest arms export market, bringing in billions of pounds to our Exchequer, but we co-operate on defence and—would you believe it, Mr Chope—on how it runs its prisons system. Is it any wonder that the Government suffer from such a lack of credibility on human rights in Saudi Arabia?