Rights Group Calls U.S. Blind to Saudi Abuses

Amnesty International accused the United States and the rest of the industrialized world today of ignoring human rights violations by Saudi Arabia because of the desert kingdom’s massive economic power.

Despite a history of arbitrary arrests, torture, unfair trials and harsh punishments such as flogging and beheading, Saudi Arabia has never been held to the same human rights standards that Washington and its allies apply to China, Myanmar, Sudan and other nations accused of widespread repression, the human rights group said.

“The country’s strategic position and vast oil resources have led governments and businesses around the world to subordinate human rights to economic and strategic interests,” the group said in a 19-page report.

In addition to an annual report detailing the human rights situation in most of the world’s countries, Amnesty International issues one detailed report each year focusing on a single country. This year the organization focused on Saudi Arabia. And it coupled its report with a call for a grass-roots campaign to protest Saudi abuses.

“The U.N. Commission on Human Rights has, over the years, publicly expressed concern about the human rights situation in a wide range of countries in all regions of the world, but it has never publicly addressed the serious human rights situation in Saudi Arabia,” the report said.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the report.

The State Department, in its own annual report earlier this year on human rights around the globe, cited evidence of arbitrary arrests, torture, executions, religious persecution and a variety of other abuses in Saudi Arabia.

But Maureen Greenwood, advocacy director of Amnesty International, said in an interview Monday that the State Department report’s bland language blunted the emotional impact of its charges. Even so, she said, “there is a disconnect between the human rights report and U.S. foreign policy.” For economic and diplomatic reasons, she said, U.S. policy glosses over the human rights situation in the kingdom.

The Saudi government does not normally disclose much information about its justice system, but there is no doubt that it takes a firm stand against crime. According to the State Department, Saudi Arabia acknowledged 100 executions last year, many of them public beheadings.

The Amnesty International report charged that at least some people, often foreigners, were condemned after unfair trials in which they were denied defense counsel and in which confessions extorted under torture made up the bulk of the evidence. The report detailed several cases by name that it claimed ended with defendants being executed unfairly.

Many of the announced Saudi executions were for murder and rape, but Amnesty said that a wide range of nonviolent crimes also resulted in decapitation. Among the lesser offenses that led to executions were “apostasy, witchcraft, sexual offenses and crimes involving both hard and soft drugs.”

The State Department and Amnesty International agree that both Saudi citizens and foreigners were executed. Amnesty International said, however, that Saudi justice falls more heavily on outsiders and people from the margins of society. It said the system is especially harsh in its treatment of foreign workers, who make up about a quarter of the Saudi population; critics of the regime; and religious minorities, including Christians, Sikhs and Shiite Muslims.

The report was based primarily on the testimony of foreigners because, it said, Saudi citizens who run afoul of the system are seldom allowed to leave the country. Amnesty International said the government rejected its request to collect evidence inside the country.

One witness, Stanley Kizzie, a retired U.S. Army officer from Fayetteville, N. C., said he was held for 5 1/2 months on narcotics charges at the direction of a senior Saudi prince, even though the head of the drug police considered him innocent. He was eventually deported.

In an interview, Kizzie said that, before his arrest, he was employed for a little more than two years by a contractor working for the Saudi Defense Ministry. He said he took the job in Saudi Arabia because it paid well.

“For most Americans working in Saudi Arabia, there is a false sense of security,” he said. “I would like to make the world aware of what happened to me. What happened to me could happen to anyone.”