Saudi Court Upholds Harsh Sentence for Aid Worker Who Criticized Gov’t

A Saudi Arabian appeals court has upheld the sentence that a counterterrorism court handed down in April against Red Crescent aid worker Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan for criticizing the government on Twitter: 20 years in prison followed by a 20-year travel ban. Al-Sadhan’s sister, Areej, a California resident and dual citizen of Saudi Arabia and the United States, disclosed the court’s ruling late Wednesday night, saying that it was handed down on Tuesday. The court itself did not make the decision public. Al-Sadhan’s family suspects that his identity was leaked to Saudi authorities by two Twitter employees, Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah. The two were indicted on charges of spying for the kingdom after allegedly accessing the private user data of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts, and providing Saudi officials with information on around 35 dissidents and critics of the kingdom. Areej Al Sadhan says her brother was picked up by Saudi security forces in Riyadh in March 2018 and held incommunicado at an undisclosed location until February 2020. During that time, she charges, he was subject to severe torture and abuse, including beatings, electrocution, sleep deprivation, verbal and sexual assault. The US State Department, in a rare critical comment against the Saudi crackdown on human rights activists, said Wednesday that it was disappointed by the ruling, and that “the peaceful exercise of universal rights should never be a punishable offense” and that the US would continue to “encourage legal reforms that advance respect for human rights of all individuals.”