02 April 2019 :

On 30 October 2018, United Nations human rights experts have called on Saudi Arabia to stop the imminent execution of six people sentenced to death for activities related to a wave of anti-government protests in 2011 while they were under the age of 18. In a joint statement they said that the six men were sentenced to death for alleged crimes that actually amount to the “criminalization of the exercise of fundamental rights, including freedom of assembly and expression.”

The experts, who include Agnes Callamard, the UN Special Rapporteur on arbitrary executions, said that since the individuals were minors at the time of alleged offenses, imposing the death penalty on them runs counter to international law and would amount to “arbitrary executions.”

They said the men were also subjected to torture and ill-treatment, and were “forced to confess, denied adequate legal assistance during trial and never had access to an effective complaint mechanism.”

The six were named as: Ali al-Nimr, Dawood al-Marhoon, Abdullah al-Zaher, Mujtaba al-Sweikat, Salman Qureish and Abdulkarim al-Hawaj.

Those protests were part of the Arab Spring movement, a series of uprisings and revolutions that started across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 against unemployment, inflation as well as corruption, among other things.

In Saudi Arabia, the protests have not managed to grow much beyond Internet campaigns as the kingdom has redefined its “anti-terrorism” laws, notably expanding the remit of its security forces and judicial system.

Meanwhile, the UN experts said that while the Saudi government has revised legislation related to the punishment for juvenile offenders, the capital punishment can still be handed out to children between ages 15 and 18.

(Source: https://www.presstv.com/DetailFr/2018/10/30/578500/UN-Saudi-Arabia-rights-record-executions-children)