15 Sep 22 | News and features, Saudi Arabia
The decades-long sentences handed to two Saudi Arabian women for their use of Twitter in recent weeks have shocked the world. The jail terms imposed on the women represent a significant ramping up of the crackdown on online speech by the country’s rulers and have thrown further light on the activities of Saudi Arabia’s Specialized Criminal Court (SCC).
The SCC was set up in 2008, its purpose being to handle the trials of people involved in terrorist attacks in the country linked to al-Qaeda. However, following the 2011-12 protests kindled by the Arab Spring movement, it also began handling the cases of peaceful activists whose views differed from those of the country’s rulers.
In 2016, the UN Committee Against Torture expressed their concerns that the country’s 2014 Penal Law for Crimes of Terrorism and its Financing had broadened the definition of terrorism “to enable the criminalisation of acts of peaceful expression considered as endangering ‘national unity’ or undermining ‘the reputation or position of the State’”. The legislation was revised in 2017.
Of more concern is the use of the SCC to try cases relating to Saudi’s anti-cybercrime laws which includes the offence of “the production, preparation, transmission, or storage of material impinging on public order, religious values, public morals, or privacy, through an information network or computer.”
The SCC is also routinely trying cases under the country’s cybercrime legislation and recent cases against two women for using Twitter are of particular concern.
At the end of August, the SCC convicted Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani on charges of “using the internet to tear the (Saudi Arabia’s) social fabric” and “violating public order” via social media” and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Two weeks earlier, Salma al-Shehab was sentenced to 34 years in prison and a subsequent travel ban of the same length for using Twitter to support human rights defenders in her native Saudi Arabia while she was studying at the University of Leeds. A number of her tweets were posted when she was outside the country.
The length of the two sentences is particularly shocking given that the country’s terrorism laws suggest a maximum sentence of 30 years for activities such as supplying explosives or hijacking an aircraft.
These two examples are just the latest in a long line of cases involving egregious abuses of human rights. The SCC has also been accused of keeping detainees incommunicado and denying them access to lawyers before their trials and also stands accused of being complicit in the use of torture or ill treatment of detainees to obtain confessions.
During the 2011 protests, Muhammad al-Bajadi, co-founder of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, was arrested on charges of “insurrection against the ruler, instigating demonstrations, and speaking with foreign [media] channels”. On 10 April 2012, al-Bajadi was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and a five-year ban on foreign travel. He was accused of unlawfully establishing a human rights organisation, distorting the state’s reputation in media and impugning judicial independence among other charges.
Influential Shi’a cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was arrested in July 2012 over his support for the 2011 protests and for “inciting sectarianism”. He was denied access to his lawyer in pre-trial detention and was sentenced to death in October 2014, a sentence that was carried out 15 months later. The cleric’s nephew, Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr was also imprisoned and sentenced to death when he was only 17 years old for his role in the 2011 protests. While the SCC sentenced him to death by “crucifixion”, it was commuted in February 2021 after the death penalty for some crimes committed by children was ended. In October 2021, Ali al-Nimr was released from prison.
In 2012, 17-year-old Dawood al-Marhoun was arrested for protesting discrimination against Saudi Arabia’s Shi’a minority during the 2011 protests. After nearly two years of detention in which he was regularly denied access to a lawyer and prevented from communicating with his family, al-Marhoun was convicted by the SCC of all charges and sentenced to death. In November 2020, his sentence was commuted to ten years in prison.
In 2016, journalist Alaa Brinji was handed a five-year sentence and a subsequent travel ban for “insulting the rulers of the country”, “inciting public opinion” and “violating Article 6 of the Anti-Cyber Crime Law”. The charges result from Brinji’s use of Twitter to support Saudi Arabian women’s right to drive cars and for raising the cases of other human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience.
Women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul is another who has passed through the SCC system. Al-Hathloul was arrested in May 2018 and initially denied access to a lawyer and was not permitted to speak with her family. During her detention, she was tortured. Her case was transferred from the Criminal Court in Riyadh to the SCC in 2020 and she was charged with sharing information about women’s rights in Saudi Arabia with journalists and human rights activists abroad. She was sentenced to more than five years in prison but was released in February 2021 after international pressure, including from Index. On release, part of her sentence was suspended but the original sentence has since been reinstated by the SCC including a five-year travel ban.
In 2018, the Saudi authorities arrested Mohammed al-Rabiah, an activist who has peacefully opposed the Saudi male guardianship system. He was charged with “striving to destabilise the social fabric and weaken national cohesion and community cohesion” and “communicating with others with the intent of disturbing the security and stability of the nation” under both the cybercrime and terrorism legislation. In March 2021, al-Rabiah’s case was transferred to the SCC and he was sentenced to six years and six months in prison followed by a travel ban.
Other sentences handed down by the SCC include 15 years of imprisonment and a further 25 year travel ban to lawyer Waleed abu al-Khair.
The case of internet activist Dr Lina Al-Sharif is also expected to be handled by the SCC.
The Gulf Centre for Human Rights reports that in late May 2021, a group of agents of the Presidency of State Security raided the family home and arrested Dr Al-Sharif arbitrarily without a warrant. She was then detained incommunicado for two months before being transferred to Al-Ha’ir Prison in Riyadh, where she is still being held.
Prior to her arrest, Dr Al-Sharif was active on social media, discussing Saudi politics and advocating for women’s rights, freedom of belief and freedom of expression, in addition to calling for the release of all prisoners of opinion.
Despite this peaceful expression of her views, the Saudi government has informed the UN that she faces charges under the 2017 Law of Combating Crimes of Terrorism and its Financing. The precedents set in the other cases handled by the SCC suggest that Dr Al-Sharif faces similarly harsh sentencing.
Actions around the make-up of the SCC also suggest a consolidation of state control over the court. According to an Amnesty International report, in 2017, several SCC judges were arbitrarily arrested as part of a broader crackdown on civil society and the consolidation of prosecutorial powers and intelligence agencies in the hands of the King and Crown Prince. This was followed by the appointment or promotion of 110 judges of various ranks by the King. The actions of the SCC have drawn widespread criticism from around the world. Human Rights Watch called for its abolition in 2012. It said at the time, “Trying Saudi political activists as terrorists merely because they question abuses of government power demonstrates the lengths the Saudi government will go to suppress dissent.”
In December 2021, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom said in a report, “The SCC imposes harsher sentences than other Saudi criminal courts for similar offences, routinely denies defendants access to legal counsel, and delays issuing judicial decisions. The court’s convictions are sometimes based on confessions obtained through torture.” Amnesty International’s own examination of individual cases heard by the SCC identified examples of “judges accept[ing] defendants’ pre-trial confessions as evidence of guilt without investigating how they were obtained.” This also included examples of defendants subsequently retracting confessions due to them being coerced.
Marking 20 months since the arbitrary arrest of Salma al-Shehab in Saudi Arabia, Index on Censorship CEO Ruth Smeeth said, “Courts are not weapons to be used to equate free expression with acts of terror. The weaponising of the SCC to target free online expression corrupts the judiciary against the public and ultimately turns the state against its citizens. The number of people who have been sentenced, imprisoned and even executed due to the opaque actions of this court is a shocking indictment of the modern Saudi state, the hollowing out of its judiciary and its disregard for human rights.”
12 Aug 22 | Iran, Iraq, News and features
At four in the afternoon on 16 April 2022, Iranian documentary filmmaker Gelareh Kakavand was at home when there was an insistent hammering at the door.
“There were five security police officers accompanied by a woman. They threatened to break it if it didn’t open immediately,” Kakavand told Index.
“They locked me in a room, put a camera in front of me, and started searching the house. When I protested that this was illegal to search my house and confine me in the room, they threatened to arrest and beat me.”
After the search of her home, which doubled up as her film studio, they confiscated Kakavand’s camera, camcorder and mobile phone.
Across the city at around the same time, Kakavand’s fellow filmmaker Vahid Zarezade returned home to find his door broken down.
“Agents had stormed my residence in my absence,” said Zarezade in an interview with Index. “The intelligence and security officers had told my landlord that the occupant of the house was engaged in ‘fraud and embezzlement’.”
The couple were then taken to one of Iran’s intelligence ministry buildings and interrogated, accompanied by threats, obscenities and insults.
Their work in documentaries – which they like to refer to as artivism – had always attracted unwanted attention from the authorities.
“During our career, we have made films about political prisoners such as Abbas Amir-Entezam, Mohammad Ali Amouei and Jila Bani Yaghoub, and the problems and sufferings of life and education among Baha’is in Iran. We also covered Keyvan Emamverdi’s case, documenting cases of sexual harassment and rape, and the emergence of the Iranian #metoo movement,” said Zarezade.
“As a result, we faced security, professional, and even financial and livelihood issues. Because of a film we made about the removal of paintings in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Iran we were handed a two-year suspended sentence and fined. We were also threatened many times for our film about Entezam. I was also imprisoned for one of the documentaries I worked on,” he said.
They were threatened verbally and had contracts cancelled for refusing to bow down to the authorities.
It soon became clear that the violent April raids related to a documentary they had started making two years earlier called White Torture, based on the book of the same name by human rights defender Narges Mohammadi.
White Torture features hard-hitting accounts of torture and sexual and physical humiliation faced by prisoners in Iran, particularly those who follow the Baha’i faith, the country’s second-most followed religion after Islam. The name refers to psychological torture relating to the extreme sensory deprivation and isolation of solitary confinement.
After they were released from interrogation but still fearing for their lives, Kakavand and Zarezade made the difficult decision to flee the country, prompted by the re-arrest and imprisonment of Mohammadi.
“We were worried the security forces might have gotten hold of the hard drives that contained videos and human rights documents, so we decided to leave Iran to make the pressure less on the members of the group as well as our families,” said Zarezade.
“We left Iran in order to finish the film and to ensure the narrators would remain secure and the accounts of prisoners would be preserved.”
Index spoke to Zarezade at an undisclosed location as the pair decided on their next moves.
—
Vahid Zarezade has been fascinated by the world of cinema since childhood.
“Despite my family’s disagreement, my first and only choice was to study cinema at university. Gradually, I started getting more interested in documentaries,” he said. “Society and my surroundings, with their cruelty and injustice, made the poetic and dreamlike aspect of cinema seem unreachable and impractical. Through documentaries I could intertwine concrete reality with the world of cinema.”
Zarezade soon began collaborating with Gelareh Kakavand on documentary work.
“Gelareh is a reflection of an egalitarian and demanding artist. More than being a filmmaker, she tries to create inner reflections and experiments. For example, in a film project about Iran’s mandatory hijab, she was one of those who used to walk the streets without a hijab many years ago. For many people, this was very inspiring.”
He believes that making films in Iran is not difficult but that the problems come later.
“What is difficult is the supervision and censorship that is applied to every cultural product and not only films, and this exhausts the artists,” he said. “The security system very noticeably monitors the artistic community of Iran and threatens them in different ways.”
Zarezade says filming White Torture was inevitable. “It was not me who chose to film this documentary, it was White Torture that chose me.”
“I was imprisoned years ago because of making a documentary which was never completed.
“Prison had a great impact on my life and my choices. During those years, I became acquainted with different people and thoughts. Throughout all those years, I endeavoured to highlight this both directly and indirectly in my projects. After getting to know Narges Mohammadi and becoming aware of the book she was writing, White Torture, I suggested making a documentary simultaneously.”
White Torture includes an interview with fellow Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced to six years in prison in July. In the footage, Panahi and his lawyer go to court to complain against solitary confinement.
Zarezade believes the White Torture, which was released in spring 2022 White Torture and won an award at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival, shines a strong light on what is truly happening in Iran.
“For years, the Iranian regime claims not to have any political prisoners and that the judicial system of the country perfectly performs according to law and justice. Totalitarian regimes are always trying to create an appropriate image of how they govern the society to the world. Taking a look at prisons and the diaries of prisoners and civil right activists will make the reality clear,” he said.
“In a country where endeavouring to create a civil society is considered a crime, in a country where a women’s right activist is charged by the crime of being a feminist, there probably would be no space left for civil demands and seeking justice. They have taken a large part of the Iranian society as hostage and their propaganda machine is spreading lies day and night.”
Despite their relative safety, the future for Zarezade and Kakavand remains uncertain.
“I think we will always be concerned about being forced back to Iran. We get out of the house infrequently,” Zarezade explained. “On the streets and in crowded places, even when grocery shopping, we do not address each other in Farsi. This is because the security agents of the Islamic Republic are very active outside the country, taking hostages and even committing assassinations. What happened to Ruhollah Zam shows that it is not far-fetched for them to kidnap people in any country.” (Zam, the founder of Amadnews and a critic of the Iranian government, was executed in December 2020 after being lured from exile in France. He was tricked into attending a meeting in Iraq where he was seized by agents of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps in what they described as “a complicated operation”.
Zarezade says he has now become numb to censorship.
“I have spent 40 years of my life under supervision and censorship. Sometimes I feel like I have become my own censor. To my mind, the responsibility of the art and its artist is to turn a blind eye to censorship and move around it with new means of expression. This might seem unreachable in practice but what is important is to ignore censorship in art and do your work your own way regardless. Thus, your work, just like a signature that solely belongs to you, will go through a monitoring and censoring process and the new work that comes out of these censoring processes will find its own way of publication and survival.
26 Jul 22 | Asia and Pacific, News and features
People protest in Myanmar against the military coup in 2021. Photo: Htin Linn Aye
The last time a political activist was hanged in Myanmar was in 1976, when the ethnic Chin student Salai Tin Maung Oo, 25, was executed for sedition. I was hoping against hope that the junta was bluffing when it announced in early June 2022 that it would go ahead with the execution of four political prisoners on death row, Phyo Zeyar Thaw, Kyaw Min Yu, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw.
I knew too well what the regime was capable of. Since the February 2021 coup, daily atrocities by security forces, extrajudicial killings and tortures to death of hundreds of civilians are well documented. The lives of two of my poet friends in their prime, K Za Win and Khet Thi, were cut short by the regime in March 2021 and May 2021 respectively for their leading role in the anti-coup protests.
Zeyar Thaw and Min Yu (AKA Jimmy) are big names in Myanmar. Jimmy belonged to the 1988 protest movement. He spent a total of 21 of his 53 years of life behind bars as a prisoner of conscience. Zeyar Thaw belonged to a younger generation, politicised by the 2007 Saffron Revolution, a protest led by the Myanmar monks. Myo Aung and Thura Zaw are likely to be ‘the 2021 generation.’
The original Burmese title of my poem is The Rope. I translated it into English and gratefully accepted an editorial suggestion that The Rope be retitled On the Ropes. Whatever happened to the sacrifice of all the activists since Tin Maung Oo, not to mention many nameless martyrs before and after him?
Wherever we are, we earthlings may be on the ropes against tyranny of all sorts — from dictatorships in the East and blatant lies by elected politicians in the West to ubiquitous corporate greed and hypocrisy. Because of this failure in leadership and our lack of common sense as a common species, we may as well be on the ropes against the biggest blow of our times, the climate crisis.
On the Ropes
In all manners of capital punishment
hanging is
the most hideous.
To ancient Greeks
the rope takes away more than life.
It takes away decency
even in death.
Had the Romans hanged Jesus
—instead of nailing him on a crucifix—
the Christian church wouldn’t
have had much impact.
Would you hang around
your neck an icon of a broken-neck Jesus,
hanging by the neck
on a noose?
Be it short drop, pole method,
standard, or long drop,
the hanged is condemned
to indignity.
Once the neck snaps midair
the body shits and pisses itself,
the eyes bulge,
the tongue sticks out of the mouth,
if not stuck between the lips,
bloodied and bitten.
The Klan loves to lynch their victims.
Only racist hatred justifies the rope.
Hanging cannot be accomplished
without gravity.
This makes the innocent Gaia complicit
in our human crime—
in its ferity and finality.
A version of this poem was circulated in SUSPECT newsletter on 16 June 2022.
24 Jun 22 | News and features, Rwanda, Uganda, United Kingdom
While President Paul Kagame of Rwanda was welcoming 53 visiting heads of government to his capital, perhaps the thought went through his mind that this was a moment for self-congratulation. Once, he was an exile from a country too dangerous for people of his ethnicity. Now he stands on the world stage.
Under Kagame’s iron rule, little landlocked Rwanda, a country not much bigger than Wales and horribly scarred by civil war and genocide, was honoured to be chosen to host the 2022 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the first since the pandemic.
There have been 24 such summits, colloquially known as Chogm, which bring together components of the old British Empire, but never before has one been held in a country that had not previously experienced British rule. Until a generation ago, the boundary between anglophone and francophone Africa was where Rwanda abutted Uganda, but Kagame has shifted that boundary westward, and become a new addition to the Commonwealth family.
That is a part of the reason that his government was able to secure the deal to receive the UK’s unwanted asylum seekers, which was a coup for Kagame, despite the subsequent legal obstacles. In announcing it, Boris Johnson has lauded Rwanda as “one of the safest countries in the world”.
That remark invokes a scathing riposte from Carine Kanimba, whose father, Paul Rusesabagina, is Rwanda’s best known political prisoner. “Within Rwanda, people are not safe,” she said. “Rwandans in the Congo, where Kagame has troops, are not safe; Rwandans in other African countries are not safe. Even outside of Africa, Rwandans are not safe, and having Boris Johnson say ‘hey, I don’t care’ sets a rally bad precedent.”
There is a dark underside to Rwanda’s post-genocide history, which has been obscured by the horror of what happened over ten weeks in 1994, when Hutu extremists massacred hundreds of thousands of the Tutsi minority. Relieved that the violence has subsided, the developed world has poured aid into the country, and was willing to accept the image Kagame projects as the firm ruler who brought peace to a troubled land. In Rwanda, there are no independent media to tell a different story. President Kagame tolerates no criticism at home, and his opponents abroad have to be constantly aware that his agents might hunt them down.
Rusesabagina is the only Rwandan whose fame matches Kagame’s. He is a Hutu, who ran a hotel in Kigali in 1994, where he provided sanctuary for hundreds of Tutsi, whose lives he saved. They included two tiny children, Anaȉse and Carine Kanimba, whose Tutsi parents had been slaughtered, and whom he adopted as his daughters. His story was told in the 2004 film, Hotel Rwanda.
Rusesabagina went into exile early in Kagame’s presidency – he obtained Belgian citizenship – and became a critic of the regime. In August 2020, he was persuaded by a man he trusted, a pastor named Constantin Niyomwungere, to board a private plane bound – he thought – for Burundi. He had been tricked. The plane landed in Kigali, where Rusesabagina was seized and sentenced to 25 years in prison. A prison term that long, imposed on a man who turned 68 in June, has been aptly described by the Belgian MEP, Kathleen van Brempt, as a “de facto death sentence”.
“Constantin Niyomwungere is an agent of the Rwandan government,” Carine Kanimba claims. “He spent two years getting our father’s trust. He was told ‘you have to find a way of getting him to Rwanda’. Our father believed he was going to an exchange between bishops in Burundi.”
“The flight from Dubai to Rwanda cost 120,000 US dollars,” Anaȉse Kanimba added. “Dad was the only one in the plane, apart from the crew, and Niyomwungere.”
Rwanda is one of the poorest countries in Africa, heavily reliant on foreign aid.
No member of Rusesabagina’s family can risk being in Rwanda while Kagame is in power, so their only contact with him is a five-minute phone call, once a week, on a Friday. He tries to sound upbeat, but they know that he is struggling with health problems. He used to listen to Radio America, but now he is allowed to hear only the strictly controlled Rwandan media.
And yet, considering what they have been through, the sisters come over as remarkably cheerful. They exude confidence that their family will be reunited, citing the precedent of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release from an Iranian jail, and international opinion is increasingly on their side. “One of the things we have learnt from [Nazanin’s husband] Richard Ratcliffe is to push any button, then follow on, and follow on,” Anaȉse said. “We are certain that Dad will come home.”
Their father’s arrest has been condemned by the European Parliament, and by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. On 19 May, the US State Department declared that Rusesabagina had been “wrongfully detained” – ironically, on the day after the Home Secretary Priti Patel had met Rwanda’s foreign minister in Geneva to finalise arrangements for deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. On Tuesday, 21 June, the US House of Representatives debated a motion calling for Rusesabagina’s release. But so far, Kagame’s credibility in the eyes of the UK government is apparently intact.
“The US has taken the courageous road,” Carine remarked. “But what we are seeing from the UK is the opposite – the road of cowardice. Boris Johnson has put Kagame on a pedestal.”
“I don’t have any faith in Boris Johnson,” Anaȉse said. “But maybe Prince Charles will have the humanity and leadership to speak to Kagame.”
What they hope is that Kagame will need to make a gesture to protect his reputation, and releasing the elderly Rusesabagina would be the obvious attention grabber – but if that happens, it still leaves others in his grip, including some exceptionally courageous journalists.
In April 2020, a young journalist named Cyuma Hassan Dieudonne, also known as Dieudonne Niyonsenga, who ran a YouTube channel called Ishema TV, went out to report on conditions in the Rwandan countryside. He was arrested, held in pre-trial detention for 11 months, released, rearrested, and sentenced to seven years in prison, an outcome that Reporters Without Borders has described as “absurd and arbitrary”.
“This guy was so brave,” Carine said. “He is 29 years old, the same age as me, he went out into parts of the country and reported on Covid restrictions, police brutality and all the news the government did not want reported, that is, not about Kigali and its clean streets. His sister has visited him in prison. She says he has been treated so badly that he will probably never have children. This is the consequence of speaking out in Rwanda.”
Even those who flee abroad cannot be sure of escaping the regime’s long arm. Patrick Karegeya was one of Kagame’s comrades in the ex-pat Tutsi army who helped to overthrow Milton Obote in Uganda in 1986, and install the current long-serving president, Yoweri Museveni. With Museveni’s blessing, they invaded Rwanda. Karegeya was head of intelligence in the new regime until he clashed with Kagame, and fled, only to be murdered in a Johannesburg hotel.
The Kanimba sisters have also been harassed and spied on – particularly Carine, who lives in Belgium, while Anaȉse is further out of reach, in Texas. A senior figure in the Rwandan government used Twitter to suggest that Carine merited the ‘Golden Machete’, a sobriquet that pro-Kagame internet trolls use to denounce those they accuse of being pro-genocidaire. It is a category that seems to include anyone and everyone who has criticised the President. Michela Wrong, the British journalist whose meticulously researched book Do Not Disturb demolished the myth of Kagame, was named winner of the 2021 Golden Machete. But machetes were the weapons used to butcher the sisters’ biological parents, so suggesting that Carine deserves a Golden Machete is, at best, a sick joke.
Most frighteningly Carine has been followed in the streets of Brussels by people she believes to be Kagame’s agents, and her phone was infected last summer with the Pegasus software, enabling hackers to trace her movements and overhear her conversations.
She says: “My phone was infected 23 times. There is a person on the other side who is obsessed with knowing what I am doing.”
“It’s all Kagame. I’m a 29-year-old woman. I’m just speaking out. It’s pathetic. Kagame wants to be recognised as a hero. We are targets.
