More than three years after he was arrested on vague allegations, Saudi political detainee Suliman al-Reshoudi, who has yet to be tried or even charged with a crime, is now taking on the system.
Although his situation is not unusual for political prisoners in Saudi Arabia, the former judge is suing the security police and the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, saying they must either charge him or release him.
It is a remarkable challenge and the first case of its kind in the kingdom.
The lawsuit, filed by activists on his behalf and led by a lawyer who can not meet his client, is based on a little-tested legal code which offers protection to detainees for the first time.
It did not exist when Reshoudi was jailed along with dozens of others for pro-reform activities, but now has become a test of the Saudi government’s avowal to improve its judicial system and boost human rights.
“We are defending Reshoudi as a model for others in prison,” said Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of the small Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association which has organized his defense.
In six hearings since December, the Ministry of the Interior, which has historically exercised a strong influence over the justice system, has failed to have the suit thrown out.
Reshoudi’s lawyer, Abdulaziz al-Wahabi, sees that as a measure of success even if his client remains in jail without charge.
Moreover, despite what one supporter called a “menacing heavy police presence” at the last hearing, the judge allowed Saudi human rights observers to attend.
“This is the first case of people publicly challenging the interior ministry in their own courts,” said Qahtani, an economist in a government think-tank.
The challenge could impact thousands of people held for years in Saudi prisons without ever being formally charged, the majority of them suspected of involvement with banned radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda.
Reshoudi, 73, was arrested on Feb. 2, 2007 while meeting in Jeddah with several activists advocating democratic and social reforms in the conservative Muslim monarchy.
Altogether, nine activists were rounded up, seven of whom remain in jail without charge while the other two were released for health issues.
Reshoudi himself was probably detained because he was preparing to sue on behalf of others who had been arrested but never charged or tried, according to Qahtani.
His lawsuit, filed on Aug. 16, last year, is the first real test of the 2002 code’s protection for detainees, which requires that a detainee be released after six months if proceedings have not begun.
It also gives detainees the right to consult a lawyer, says they are to be interrogated by the Saudi Ministry of Justice’s prosecutions department, and bans torture.
Lawyer and client have not been permitted to speak directly. They communicate through Reshoudi’s second wife, Umm Ammar, a 39-year-old Syrian.
Allowed to visit and speak to him regularly on the telephone, Umm Ammar alleges her husband has been subjected to “severe physical and psychological tortures,” at times kept in solitary confinement and shackled to a bedframe.
“Reshoudi says the prison is like Guantanamo,” Umm Ammar says.
When he and the others were arrested in 2007, the interior ministry made a statement accusing them of unspecified involvement with Iraqis and Gazans, said Wahabi, implying they had ties to Islamists.
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