Many Activists are still in prison in Saudi Arabia. Family and activists are hoping that they will soon come out of jail. However, the well-known blogger and activists are also in jail.
If everything goes well, Saudi Arabia’s well-known blogger ‘Raif Badawi‘ will soon be released from jail, most probably, next week after almost a decade in prison.
After several years of campaigning against the blogger and his wife ‘Ensaf Haider’ to release them, and the time is finally near, they are going out from prison in the early week of March.
Badawi has spent almost ten years in jail after he made a blog on “Free Saudi Liberals”. He was sentenced to a decade in prison in 2014 for “Insulting Islam” because he talked about the separation of religion and state in Saudi Arabia politics in his vlog.
While Badawi is one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent political prisoners, he is far from the only imprisoned dissident. The country has long been chastised for its human rights record.
However, the data is still unclear on how many other activists are in prison in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government claims zero, but human rights activists speak of hundreds.
According to the Amnesty Internation, more than 3000 political prisoners are locked in Saudi Arabia prison.
In 2021, many prominent women’s rights activists, including Nassima al-Sadah and Samar Badwi, Raid Badawi’s sister, were released from prison.
But, Human Rights Watch claims there is no indication which indicates that the situation is improving. “They [the freed activists] stayed banned from travel and are serving suspended sentences, allowing the authorities to return them to prison for any perceived criminal activity,” the organization wrote in their World Report 2022.
According to women’s rights activist ‘Loujain al-hathloul‘, who came out from prison in 2021, she was in jail because she demanded that women be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia.
While in jail, they torture them and give electric shocks to them. Minorities are under pressure in prison.