EU worries over rise in S’Arabia’s executions on drug related offences

The European Union Commission has expressed concern over the serious increase in executions in Saudi Arabia over the last four months this year, including executions for drug related offences.

In a statement released by the Commission on Monday stating that the death penalty is a cruel and inhumane punishment, which is incompatible with the inalienable right to life, fails to act as a deterrent to crime, represents an unacceptable denial of human dignity and integrity, and makes the miscarriages of justice irreversible.
The European Union Commission strongly opposed it at times and in all circumstances while vowed to continue to work for the abolition of the death penalty in the few remaining countries that still apply it.

Report has it in September that hundreds of prisoners lives threatened with imminent execution in Saudi Arabia on drugs-related charges, including 33 Egyptians on a single wing of Tabuk Prison.
These men are living in a state of terror, since the number of executions for such offenses has spiked in the past two months. Eight men already been executed for drugs-related offenses in Tabuk this year, and 42 in the country as a whole, including three Egyptians.

There are no official figures for the number of people sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia, but the indications are that there are hundreds of people of various nationalities in Saudi prisons who have been convicted in drugs-related cases.

However, the absence of transparency in the official handling of these cases, the lack of justice, lack of confidence in the judicial system, and fear of reprisals should they speak out in public, make it impossible for those convicted to express what they are suffering.
Saudi Arabia first suspended this category of executions from January 2020 until Nov 2022 without making any official announcement.

In January 2021, the head of the official Saudi Human Rights Commission stated that the moratorium was to give those sentenced for non-violent crimes another chance. In March 2022, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that the death penalty was now restricted to the crime of murder only.

Yet in November 2022 Saudi Arabia resumed executions for drug offenses without giving any reason or justification, executing 20 people in a single month. And despite hiatus between August 2023 and May 2024, the kingdom has once again resumed carrying out the death penalty in this type of case.