However, as in previous years, analysis of trends, attribution of responsibility and general interpretations of events are still occasionally lacking. Thus, the overall impression left by the report, as the Critique pointed out last year, is one of atomization. The report describes a series of unconnected events which, taken separately, somehow do not seem to add up to the picture of the repressive, intolerant and dictatorial regime that is Saudi Arabia. While recognizing that the rigid format of the Country Reports sometimes forces the material into unnatural subdivisions, the report’s compilers must nevertheless make a concerted effort to provide a coherent overview of connected events (or, where events are unconnected and fall into no discernible pattern, to say so explicitly).

For example, the report discusses the Mutawwi’in, whom it characterizes as "Saudi Arabia’s official proctors of proper moral behavior," in nine separate places. Nowhere, however, does it provide any overarching explanation of the role of the Mutawwi’in that would make their various activities intelligible to the reader. And although the 1993 report does a much better job than its predecessor of attributing to the government some measure of responsibility for the actions of the Mutawwi’in, their relationship to the government is not fully explored. Also, despite the many examples of religiously motivated persecution cited in the report, these are never ascribed to the Saudi government’s conscious pursuit of a policy of religious repression and intolerance. The report might usefully have observed that this policy stems from the Saudi government’s cynical belief that it can employ just enough religious persecution to appease certain internal constituencies without offending allies such as the United States and Great Britain. A vigorous debate is currently underway in Saudi Arabia on the relationship between Islam and government, but the report does not overtly acknowledge this fact, despite its direct impact on the state of human rights in the Kingdom.

Among the most significant developments in Saudi Arabia in 1993 were those involving two indigenous human rights groups, one founded within the Kingdom and one operating largely in exile. Neither group fared well. The Saudi government brutally repressed the domestic group, and forced the other to cease its activities abroad. The report only reported on the first of these groups, however, and even then omitted some important details.

A group of academics and lawyers formed Saudi Arabia’s first ever indigenous human rights group, the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR) in May 1993. The CDLR based its criticism of the Saudi government on Islamic principles and thus formed part of an increasingly active religious opposition. It was reported, for example, that the group was formed in response to the detention of a religious scholar, Sheikh Ibrahim al-Dibyan, and of two other men, on the ground that their wives had organized private religious study circles. The swiftness and brutality of the Saudi government’s response shows that it perceived the group As a serious threat to its own religious legitimacy.

On May 3, the CDLR issued a statement announcing its formation and objectives. On May 8, the signatories were summoned before the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman, who threatened to have them condemned by the Council of Senior Ulema, Saudi Arabia’s highest body of authorized interpreters of Islamic law. On May 12, the Council did so, although it was reported that some members refused to sign the legal opinion condemning the CDLR, and that King Fahd then had them replaced. On May 13, the CDLR founders were fired from their jobs. On May 15, physics professor Mohammed al-Mas’ari, the group’s spokesman and son of one of its founders, was detained. The younger al-Mas’ari had served as an interpreter at a meeting between officials from the US embassy and CDLR members only three days before; a State Department spokesman admitted that the meeting had been discussed shortly afterwards with the Saudi government. On May 19, at least 40 people were reported arrested for expressing their concern about the detention of al-Mas’ari. In addition, the homes and offices of the founders were searched by Saudi security personnel and personal books and papers confiscated. On June 17, one of the group’s founders, ‘Abdallah al-Hamid, was detained. On August 8, attorney Sulayman al-Rushudi, another founder, was detained. On August 9, some 60 academics who wrote to King Fahd requesting the release of the detainees were put under a travel ban; a small number of them were summoned before Prince Salman and informed of the King’s displeasure. It was not until October that a number of the detainees were released. Mohammed al-Mas’ari was not released until November, according to the State Department, after spending 6 months in prison. He was reportedly tortured while in detention.

The report makes no reference to the allegations that Mohammed al Mas’ari was tortured or the fact that he was held incommunicado. It also fails to report the travel ban on the professors who expressed support for the detainees. The report should also have mentioned the Saudi government’s use of the Council of Senior Ulema as a tool to stifle free speech and human rights advocacy, even when such advocacy was grounded in the Shari’a. Given the significance of the CDLR’s appearance and suppression, a longer and more detailed discussion would have been warranted.

Entirely absent from this year’s report was any mention of a second human rights group, the International Committee for Human Rights in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula (ICHR-GAP). ICHR-GAP has been operating for the last several years out of an office in Washington, DC, regularly publishing press statements and fact sheets on human rights in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, and providing an important source of information about countries for which human rights data is notoriously difficult to come by. ICHR-GAP’s activities have often focused on discrimination against Shi’a in the Gulf countries.

On July 27 a spokesman for ICHR-GAP was detained for 24 hours upon his arrival at Dhahran. More significantly, talks between the Saudi government and various representatives of the Saudi Shi’i community (including some in exile) led in July to the release of a number of Shi’i political prisoners. According to Human Rights Watch/Middle East, the Saudi government demanded in exchange that ICHR-GAP and a related Shi’i opposition group operating abroad, the Reform Movement, cease publishing materials critical of Saudi human rights practices. ICHR-GAP has been silent since late September. The State Department report should have noted this deliberate interference with ICHR-GAP and the Reform Movement.

Officially sanctioned religious intolerance and persecution continued unabated in Saudi Arabia in 1993. Saudi Shi’a, as well as expatriate Christians and Hindus, bore the brunt of government-supported religious intolerance. This year’s report noted adequately many such abuses, including restrictions on Shi’i religious rites; the harassment, arrest and even flogging of Christians for religious worship; and the collective punishment of Hindus, through firings and deportation, in apparent retaliation for outbreaks of religious unrest in India. Despite the Saudi government’s rapprochement with certain Shi’i groups, institutionalized discrimination against the Shi’a persists. Some Sunni clerics, such as Sheikh Nasser bin Sulayman al-Omar, have called for an active anti-Shi’a campaign, including forced conversion to Sunnism and other repressive measures. The report did note that economic and social discrimination against the Kingdom’s Shi’a minority is "officially sanctioned," and reported that only one member out of 60 in the newly-appointed Consultative Council was Shi’i. It also noted the release of a number of Shi’i prisoners and the return, at government invitation, of some exiled Shi’a. Finally, perhaps in recognition of Sadiq Malallah, executed in 1992 for apostasy, this year’s report noted the absence of any executions for apostasy in 1993.

For the sake of completeness, the State Department should have cited the September 1993 report by Amnesty International on discrimination against religious minorities in Saudi Arabia. It might usefully have noted Amnesty International’s finding that the harassment of Christians appears to be aimed primarily at nationals of developing countries. This lends weight to the thesis that the Saudi government tolerates such harassment as a matter of political expediency, as long as nationals (and especially diplomats) of developed countries are not affected. The Amnesty International report also contained a cogent analysis of Saudi laws governing arrest and detention, which should be reviewed by the drafters of the State Department report. These omissions are surprising, given that the report did elsewhere cite Amnesty International’s findings on the sharp upturn in the number of executions in the Kingdom.

This year’s report adequately notes the escalating number of human rights abuses committed by the Mutaww-i’in and their sympathizers, and provides numerous examples of Mutawwi’in harassment, based especially on gender and religion. The report hints occasionally at the government’s reluctance to restrain the Mutawwi’in. However, it again makes an unhelpful distinction between the semi-official Mutawwi’in and vigilantes. Such a distinction might be important if there was any marked difference in the behavior of the two groups, or if the Saudi government were engaged in a serious effort to check the activities of one or other of these groups. But neither is the case. Rather than repeat this distinction year after year, the Department of State should focus on the conditions that allow the Mutawwi’in and related individuals to operate with impunity. In practice, the Mutawwi’in operate largely unchecked, harassing women, detaining those suspected of un-Islamic behavior, beating suspects and preventing peaceful worship by non-Muslims.

In its discussion of refugees, the report makes one significant error. This is the statement that Saudi Arabia has "no explicit formal policy regarding refugees or the granting of asylum." In fact, Article 42 of the 1992 Basic Law, tellingly entitled "Political Asylum and the Extradition of Criminals," provides that "The state will grant political asylum if the public interest (al-maslaha al-‘amma) militates in favor thereof." This statutory language admittedly leaves the Saudi government a great deal of flexibility without articulating a clear legal rule a characteristic of much of the Basic Law. It does, however, represent an explicit policy on political asylum. (The statute, it is worth adding, falls well short of recognized and binding standards of international humanitarian law, as embodied in the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, although Saudi Arabia is not a signatory to either.)

The report notes a major incident in 1993 at the Rafha refugee camp, where some 25,000 Iraqi refugees are housed. A riot at the camp in March resulted in the deaths of a number of Iraqis and Saudi guards. According to Human Rights Watch/Middle East, the disturbance arose when Saudi authorities refused to reunite refugees housed at Rafha with their family members who had fled Iraq to join them. The report notes that some of the refugees were alleged to have been tortured in connection with the incident. However, it provides no analysis of the cause of the riot.

A number of incidents in 1993 underscored the government’s intolerance of any but the most limited expression of ideas in the Saudi press. These included the outright sacking of newspaper writers and editors for publishing materials deemed offensive by the government or members of the religious establishment. The report cites three such incidents, and generally presents a fair and accurate picture of Saudi government restrictions on the domestic press. However, it should also have noted the government’s continuing effort to stifle Arabic publishing or broadcasting beyond Saudi Arabia’s borders. This is accomplished through the purchase of newspapers and satellite channels based outside Saudi Arabia, and through agreements requiring ostensibly free foreign broadcasters, such as Radio Monte Carlo, to engage in self-censorship and to broadcast Saudi propaganda. In this connection, the report could have mentioned Saudi ownership of al-Sharq al-Aswat and al-Hayat, two leading Arabic newspapers published abroad. Such details would give a complete and accurate picture of the Saudi government’s fear of, and deliberate interference with, the free flow of information. In its section on Freedom of Speech and Press, the report should also have cited Article 39 of the 1992 Basic Law, which seems designed to ensure that press censorship may be imposed on almost any pretext.

This year’s report refers at the outset to "systematic discrimination against women," and later provides an excellent and detailed overview of the miserable state of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. This aspect of the report could be further improved in two respects. First, it should be noted that the government tolerates and encourages certain types of discrimination against women (such as physical and verbal abuse by the Mutawwi’in) because it is politically expedient to do so. Second, the analysis of Islamic law needs to be more precise.

Where the report asserts that legal rules, such as those for inheritance, are inherently discriminatory, the source of the rule (Koran, sunna, writings of legal scholars, opinions of the Council of Senior Ulema, religious programs or writings in the media, etc.) should be specified. Islamic law is not immutable, and where the adoption of one interpretation over another contributes to human rights abuses by the Saudi government, that fact should be noted. (To its credit, this year’s report does do this in other areas). It is risky for the report to claim that a given religion or its scripture is inherently discriminatory against a particular group. At the same time, of course, where the plain meaning of a legal rule is inherently discriminatory, the Department of State should say so, whatever the rule’s provenance.

A constant if not dominant theme in any discussion of human rights practices in Saudi Arabia is religion, as underscored by most of the topics discussed above. This year’s report is careful to emphasize that a number of practices, for example in the areas of criminal procedure and the imposition of corporal and capital punishment, rest not on Islamic law as such, but on the Saudi government’s idiosyncratic interpretation of it. However, the Department of State country reports often fail to emphasize adequately the government’s systematic use of religion as cover for human rights violations (the report’s frank handling of the express Saudi rejection of binding international norms of humanitarian law in the case of the Iraqi refugees is a noteworthy exception). A sentence to that effect, rather than the usual stock phrase about the government’s legitimacy being based on its perceived adherence to Islamic norms, would lend the report greater coherence.

The Department of State might have illustrated this point by citing Prince Salman’s invocation of the Council of Senior Ulema as a pretext for human rights abuses against the CDLR. The government obviously expected the Council of Senior Ulema to declare the CDLR illegal, which they dutifully did, providing the government the necessary cover to fire the group’s members from their teaching positions, ransack their dwellings and confiscate their possessions, and imprison them and their supporters. In Islamic legal theory, interpreters of Islamic law are to remain independent of the state, as made abundantly clear in a dictum of Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855), eponym of the Hanbali school of legal thought, which has been officially adopted in Saudi Arabia: "This world is a sickness, political power (al-sultan, perhaps "government") a sickness, and the religious scholar (‘alim) a physician. So if you see a religious scholar bringing the sickness upon himself, beware him."

One Saudi government practice that has serious and wide-ranging consequences is the claim that certain legal norms, guarantees or rights are based on Islamic law. While it would be possible to mine Islamic legal texts and construct a workable theory of human rights and humanitarian law, or a Constitution, the Saudis have not done so. Rather, such vague allusions to Islamic law are an obfuscation, designed on the one hand to arm the government with a pretext for arbitrary decisions and on the other to lend it a veneer of religious legitimacy. The fact that other Arab and Muslim countries have better human rights records than Saudi Arabia casts serious doubt on the Saudi claim to have successfully applied an Islamic law of human rights. While the State Department report does note that Saudi Arabia "has not signed major human rights treaties and conventions," it now needs to go one step further and note the cynical use of religion to justify repressive practices. To do so would clarify the relationship between a number of seemingly isolated events discussed in this and previous reports.

The 1992 report noted the introduction of a Basic Law of Government (al-nizam al-asasi lil-hukm), designed to spell out Saudi citizens’ rights and duties vis-a-vis the state. It also noted the proposal to establish an unelected Consultative Council (majlis al-shura). This year’s report records the appointment of the Consultative Council’s members and discusses the Basic Law, making the valid observation that it represents a step backward inasmuch as it gives the King sole power to appoint the Crown Prince (previously, the Crown Prince was chosen by consensus of members of the ruling family).

The 60 members of the Consultative Council were appointed in December; as the report notes, only one was a Shi’a. As for the Basic Law, to the extent that it provides any rights to citizens (which is doubtful), it has proved meaningless in practice. For example, as the report notes in its discussion of privacy issues, Prince Salman (identified only as "one high-ranking government official") apparently played back tape recordings of telephone calls made by ‘Abdallah al-Mas’ari, founder of the CDLR, during a meeting shortly after the group’s founding (the Department of State’s reticence about naming Prince Salman is itself curious). Yet Article 40 of the Basic Law provides that personal communications, including telegraph, mail and telephones, "are protected and may not be confiscated, delayed or examined except in those instances specified by law." (This article should also have been cited where the report observed that, "Saudi customs officials routinely open mail coming into the Kingdom.") It should also be noted that the searches of homes of members of the CDLR appear to have violated at the very least the spirit of Article 37 of the 1992 Basic Law. That section, entitled "Protection of Dwellings," provides that private dwellings may not be entered without the permission of their owner, except as specified by law. Of course, all such statues that fail to specify exceptions to the rules they contain are badly drafted, probably deliberately so.

Article 24 of the Basic law states that the government will allow the greater and lesser pilgrimages, as well as visits to Medina, to be made "in comfort and peace" (bi-yusr wa tuma’nina). Yet Saudi Interior Ministry authorities again this year banned the distribution of any and all publications during the pilgrimage and arrested those distributing literature. In addition, the Iranian press reported that a Shi’i religious facility in Mecca was besieged for a short time in June by troops and armored vehicles, perhaps in connection with the commemoration of the death of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Finally, Article 36 of the Basic Law provides that, "It is not permitted to restrict a person’s movements, arrest them or imprison them, except in accordance with the rules of law." The fact that scores of persons were detained for the non-violent expression of their views in 1993 in Saudi Arabia belies this guarantee. In addition to members and supporters of the CDLR, a number of Sunni clerics were detained in the Qaseem region, and a number of clerics and their students were detained in Mecca for distributing a publication entitled al-Qibla.

In its first year, then, the Basic Law has done little or nothing to change Saudi Arabia’s deplorable human rights record, although though it has provided the statutory authority for a number of repressive practices. The report should have emphasized the conspicuous failure of the new Basic Law to improve Saudi respect for human rights.

For the second year running, the report surprisingly omits any mention of ongoing UN investigations into Saudi human rights abuses, even though the revised instructions for preparation of the Country Reports state that, "Special attention is to be paid to reports by the various UN human rights mechanisms." The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture noted not only the large number of executions in the Kingdom, but the stark inadequacy of procedures in trials for capital offenses. In sessions of the Commission, the Special Rapporteur on Torture expressed concern about the incommunicado detention and alleged torture of individuals affiliated with the CDLR, as well as the Saudi government’s failure to respond to an outstanding query from the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances regarding a "disappearance." The failure to mention UN criticism of Saudi human rights practices constitutes one of the few glaring omissions in this year’s report.

The report provides an informative discussion of the almost total absence of worker rights in Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, it fails to describe adequately the sometimes slave-like conditions under which some foreign workers are employed. The report notes that "situations that could be described as forced labor can occur," but makes no connection between the harsh practices of employers and government policy. Because Saudi sponsorship and immigration laws provide for summary deportations, it is risky for foreign workers to complain about their wages, hours or abusive treatment by an employer. Non-domestic workers may raise their complaints before labor courts, but human rights groups have reported that this incurs the risk of deportation. The human rights group Liberty for the Muslim World (UK) reported last year that the Saudi Labor and Laborers Bureau had rebuked workers for appearing to register complaints about their employers during hours in which they were contractually obligated to work. Under laws promulgated last year, workers have even more reason to fear breaking a contract or refusing to renew one. These laws tend to extend the waiting period for workers to obtain new entry visas if they have completed their contracts or refused to renew despite their employer’s wishes. Thus, a worker who wishes to end his relationship with an employer must forgo the opportunity of working in Saudi Arabia for at least one year.

The report also neglects to discuss the comments of the International Labor Organization (ILO) regarding Saudi Arabia’s implementation of ILO Conventions 100 (Equal Remuneration) and 111 (Discrimination in Employment and Occupation). (Saudi Arabia ratified both Conventions in 1978.) The ILO reported in 1993 that Saudi Arabia had consistently failed to adopt national legislation implementing the principle of equal pay for equal work. The ILO also noted that the absence of statistical data prohibited it from evaluating how Convention 100 was being applied. Regarding ILO Convention 111 on discrimination, the ILO found fault with Section 160 of the Saudi Labor Code, which provides that, "In no case may men and women co-mingle in the place of employment or in the accessory facilities or other appurtenances thereto." Though Saudi Arabia argued that the provision imposed no discriminatory conditions on hiring and was merely "a measure subsequent to recruitment dictated by the traditions in force," the ILO concluded that the rule had the effect of prejudicing equality of opportunity and was incompatible with the Convention. The ILO also criticized the Saudi policy of limiting vocational programs for women to those that were "appropriate to their nature and not contrary to Islam." These involved occupations such as nursing, teaching and sewing.

Finally, the report neglected to mention a complaint made in December 1993 by the AFL-CIO to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), protesting the inclusion of Saudi Arabia among countries eligible for OPIC-backed programs. (OPIC provides political risk insurance, loans, guarantees and financing for US companies operating in certain foreign countries.) Under a 1985 amendment to its implementing statute, OPIC may only back projects in countries "taking steps to adopt and implement laws that extend internationally recognized worker rights." The AFL-CIO complaint was brought under 22 USC 2191a(b), which provides that OPIC must hold annual hearings on, inter alia, compliance with its obligations under this language on worker rights. The AFL-CIO stated that Saudi Arabia "makes a mockery of the 1985 amendment on worker rights and a termination of that country’s benefits [under OPIC] is long overdue."