Human Lives Human Rights: One of the challenges of the international rights organization – the UN Human Rights Council is the issue of multiple standards, and here we will try to look at one example of this multiple standard policy, that is, the human rights record of the Saudi government.
The issue of human rights in Saudi Arabia has always been one of the serious challenges of the Human Rights Council, to the extent that this issue has caused a lot of ambiguity for the free thinkers of the world, because the Saudi government has been harassing, torturing and unfairly prosecuting its opponents for many years, and no international organization has stopped their actions.
Since the assassination of a prominent Saudi anti-government journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, by members of the Saudi security services in Turkey, most media outlets have covered the issue, but a few media outlets have covered the Saudis’ wide-ranging human rights record, which has added to the ambiguity.
The Saudi government’s human rights record includes the illegal detention of dissidents, confessions through torture, unfair trial and the organized murder of the Saudi government opponents. In addition, after the occurrence of social uprisings in the Middle Eastern countries, the Saudi government is acting more severely than the demands of the people.
Another point about human rights violations in Saudi Arabia is the violation of the basic rights of the country’s indigenous Shiites. The Saudi government, which is rooted in the takfiri beliefs of Wahhabism, has a long-standing enmity with the Shiites, and therefore the Shiites in Saudi Arabia are deprived of even some of their basic rights.
It was in September 2020 that 29 member states of the Human Rights Council signed a joint statement against the Saudi government’s human rights abuses for the third time. In the statement, the signatory states called for the release of all political prisoners in Saudi Arabia and expressed concern that Saudi officials were using “anti-terrorism” laws to deal with dissidents who were exercising their rights peacefully.
The joint statement came as Riyadh seeks to take over one of the 47 seats on the UN Human Rights Council, however, the Danish ambassador to the council said: “The members of the Human Rights Council are expected to be exemplary in promoting human rights and not to violate it frequently.”
In early 2022, the Saudi government executed a record 81 people in one day for terrorism-related offences. Of the 81 people killed, 73 were Saudi citizens, seven were Yemeni and one was a Syrian national. The charges that included “allegiance to foreign terrorist organizations” and holding “deviant beliefs”.
However, hours after the news broke, anti-Saudi media outlets reported that half of them were from the Shiite minority. The Naba satellite channel also reported that among those executed, 41 were Shiite youths from the Qatif area in al-Ahsa province, who had previously been arrested and imprisoned by the Saudi government under various pretexts.
However, the human rights record of the Saudi government is so much that it is possible to write several articles to list the human rights violations in this country, but the multiple standards of the UN Human Rights Council as well as the widespread support of countries such as the United States and Israel for the Saudi governments human rights abuses has always prevented the human rights abuses in the country from being addressed, adding to the growing ambiguities surrounding the UN Human Rights Council.
