degrading punishment.”
On March 4, Human Rights Watch appealed to King Abdullah not to execute the seven men and said there was “strong evidence” that they did not get a fair trial.
“It is high time for the Saudis to stop executing child offenders and start observing their obligations under international human rights law,” said Eric Goldstein, deputy Middle East director at HRW.
The following day, the king ordered a one-week suspension until the case was reviewed.
On Sunday, a Saudi paper reported that the government is looking into formally dropping public beheadings as a method of execution and instead considering death by a firing squad as an alternative. There have also been calls in the kingdom to replace public beheadings with lethal injections carried out in prisons.
The Washington-based Institute of Gulf Affairs, which campaigned for the suspension of the executions of the seven men, recently said in a note to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights that one of the reasons the seven were sentenced to death was that “they hail from the south, a region that is heavily marginalized by the Saudi monarchy, which views them as lower class citizens.”
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