In Saudi Arabia, artist Ashraf Fayadh sentenced to death for atheism

“It’s really up to the whim of judges in these cases”, Coogle said. Saudi Arabia provides the PA with US$20 million (Dh73.4m) a month for its budget, according to the Saudi embassy in Washington.

Nowhere in the court’s second judgment does it state what Fayadh said that was allegedly insulting to God and religion. “The man also alleged that Fayadh passed around a book he wrote that allegedly promoted atheism and unbelief”.

Just days earlier, Mr. Fayadh’s friends say he may have caught the attention of religious police when he filmed one of them slapping a man on the face and forcibly pinning him against a wall in Abha. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the court’s ruling on November 17, which gives some light into how judges came to issue the death sentence. Fayadh’s brother-in-law Osama Abu Raya was quoted in the Saudi Al-Watan news website this week describing the artist’s 2008 Arabic poetry book “Instructions Within” as a compilation of his thoughts as a young man. He says the book was not widely published.

The religious police held him for a day, then released him, but authorities re-arrested him on January 1, 2014.

“Repentance is a work of the heart relevant to a matter of the judiciary of the hereafter; it is not the focus of the earthly judiciary”, the ruling said. “The sentence must be approved by the appeals court and the Supreme Court”, the group stated.

Amnesty estimates that at least 151 people have been executed in Saudi Arabia so far in 2015, the highest figure recorded since 1995. Most executions are carried out by beheading, sometimes in public.

In the Wahhabi interpretation of Sharia, religious crimes, including blasphemy and apostasy, incur the death penalty.

“Saudi Arabia’s macabre spike in executions this year, coupled with the secretive and arbitrary nature of court decisions and executions in the kingdom, leave us no option but to take these latest warning signs very seriously”. Capital punishment is unique in its cruelty and finality, and it is inevitably and universally plagued with arbitrariness, prejudice, and error.

The Emirati social commentator Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi sharply condemned the death sentence, according to The Guardian, saying: “Such an abhorrent death sentence against an artist and member of the cultural community is an irreconcilable step with regards to Saudi’s cultural ambitions”. The Arab Charter on Human Rights, which Saudi Arabia has ratified, guarantees the right to freedom of opinion and expression under article 32.

She said their father suffered a stroke after hearing of the death sentence and that she has been taking tranquillisers, since learning of it. Still, she believes the Saudi justice system is fair and “our family is hopeful”, she said. He was arrested at a café in Abha after another artist reported that Fayadh cursed the Prophet Muhammad and the Saudi government.