‘Are we dogs?’ Families decry executions of foreigners in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman looks on as he meets U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, not pictured, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Wednesday Oct. 23, 2024. (Nathan Howard/Pool via AP)

Five years after her husband was executed in Saudi Arabia, Egyptian Noura Fouad is still seeking his remains, unable to lay his body to rest and pay her respects at his grave.

“My husband had an unfair trial,” the mother of three told AFP.

He had been an upstanding man “trapped by traffickers”, she added, “and his criminal record in Egypt was clean”.

Saudi Arabia executed Fouad’s spouse, Moamer Kadhafi -- named for the former Libyan leader -- in 2020 after finding him guilty of drug trafficking, a capital offence in the Gulf kingdom.

Riyadh put 129 foreigners to death last year, including 85 for drug trafficking, according to an AFP tally based on official figures -- more than triple the 34 executions recorded in both 2022 and 2023, drawing criticism from rights defenders.

UN special rapporteurs Morris Tidball-Binz and Alice Jill Edwards recently warned in a statement that Saudi “executions of foreign nationals appear to be increasingly taking place without prior notification to death row inmates, their families, or their legal representatives”.

Such was the case for Fouad, who never got to say goodbye to her husband.

“We learned of his execution from his colleagues, then from the media,” she said, her throat tight.

‘No one helped me’

Kadhafi was a driver who had been transporting vegetables between Egypt and northern Saudi Arabia when he was arrested in 2017.

Fouad was not able to speak to him for a month, and was never granted a prison visit because she did not have a visa.

“We didn’t have the means to pay for a lawyer,” she said, adding that instead they were given a court-appointed defence advocate.

Decrying the trial as unfair, she said that her husband had “only hoped to be heard”.

Her experience aligns with what Human Rights Watch’s Joey Shea has observed.

“We can’t say across the board that every single person has never had access to a lawyer,” she said, “but at least in 99 percent of the cases that we have documented, they do not.”

“And in the instances where they do have access to lawyers, they’re appointed lawyers who don’t seem to actually be working on their (clients') behalf.”

Fouad said she went to the Saudi embassy in Cairo to request her husband’s body and personal effects, “but no one helped me”.

She received his death certificate, passport and will six months later, but not his remains.

“Are we dogs to be treated like this?” she asked.

Asked for comment on the case, the Saudi authorities did not respond.

In their statement, the UN rapporteurs said foreign defendants are “often in a situation of vulnerability”, and specific measures must be granted to safeguard their rights “from the moment of arrest... including access to consular assistance”.

However, one foreign diplomat in Saudi Arabia who spoke on condition of anonymity said “we don’t necessarily get the info from the Saudi authorities, and sometimes we get it very late to act”.

‘We are worthless’

Including its own nationals, Saudi Arabia executed a total of 338 people in 2024, up from 170 the year before. So far this year, it has already executed 56 -- 22 of them foreigners.

The increase appears to fly in the face of previous statements from de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who told The Atlantic in 2022 that the death penalty would be limited to serious crimes.

Since the end of a moratorium in 2021, the country has also resumed executions for drug trafficking.

The statement from the UN rapporteurs said that as of December 2024, 75 per cent of the people executed that year for drug offences were foreigners, citing the cases of Egyptian nationals who were convicted “in trials that apparently fall short of the international standards of fairness and due process”.

But one Arab diplomat who has followed such cases said he did not believe “there is systematic discrimination against foreigners”, adding he had also seen “Saudis sentenced to death and foreigners acquitted”.

Meanwhile, in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, Amina was still waiting for the body of her husband, who was put to death by Saudi Arabia in 2022.

“My husband was executed after conviction in a murder case, even though he proved that he was not present at the crime scene at the time,” the mother of six told AFP.

“But no one cares about the foreign defendants in Saudi Arabia. No one cares about their families. We are worthless.

“All we want for now is his body,” she added. “They have denied us even that right.”