Abdullah al-Huwaiti: Child offender sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia
Al-Huwaiti had been arrested along with five others and Human Rights Watch and Reprieve have said all six defendants told court sessions that interrogators had coerced their confessions through torture or the threat of it.
Thursday 3 March 2022 18:51, UK
A Saudi man has been sentenced to death for a second time after his original conviction for crimes he allegedly committed as a child was overturned.
Abdullah al-Huwaiti was arrested when he was 14 and sentenced to death three years later in 2019 on murder and
armed robbery charges.
Al-Huwaiti had been arrested along with five others and Human Rights Watch and Reprieve have said all six defendants told court sessions that interrogators had coerced their confessions through torture or the threat of it.
A court overturned the conviction in November but, under Saudi law, a retrial followed.
Saudi authorities scrapped the death penalty for juveniles in 2020 but said they would apply this retroactively.
The kingdom's state-backed Human Rights Commission later clarified that the ban on the death penalty only applied to a lesser category of offences under Islamic law known as "ta'zeer".
Wednesday's ruling against al-Huwaiti was in the category of "qisas", or retribution, usually for murder, which under Islamic law allows families of victims to demand the death sentence, compensation or to offer a pardon.
"The Criminal Court in Tabuk sentenced the minor Abdullah al-Huwaiti in retribution," his mother Um Abdullah wrote on Twitter after Wednesday's ruling.
"After the Supreme Court overturned the first ruling because of false confessions, today it pronounces an unjust conviction just like last time."
"Abdullah al-Huwaiti has now been sentenced to death not once, but twice, by a court that knows he was 14 years old when he was arrested and tortured," Maya Foa, director of anti-death penalty charity Reprieve, said in a statement.
"How can this be when Saudi Arabia has claimed, so often and so vociferously, to have eliminated the death penalty for children?"
Saudi authorities have also previously denied allegations about the use of torture.
The Saudi government media office CIC did not immediately respond to a request for comment after al-Huwaiti's new death sentence.
In October, Ali Al-Nimr, a young Shi'ite Muslim whose death sentence had been commuted to 10 years in prison under the legislative reforms, was released from prison.