Saudi Arabia has executed 213 people so far in 2024, more than it has in any other calendar year on record, as the kingdom competes for a seat at the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). According to the London-based rights group Reprieve, which documents the death penalty worldwide, the largest recorded figure prior to this year was 196 in 2022, followed by 184 in 2019.
“As the world’s attention fixates on horror elsewhere in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is clearing death row with a bloodbath,” Reprieve’s deputy director, Harriet McCulloch, told MEE.
“The Kingdom smashed its own grim record for most people executed in a year in the first nine months of 2024,” she added. “With 213 executions and counting, death row prisoners are at greater risk than ever before, their families desperately awaiting news of their fate in the news.”
The executions are taking place under the government of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, the kingdom’s prime minister and de facto leader, who pledged in a 2018 interview to minimise capital punishment.
Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and critic of the Saudi government, was murdered on October 2, 2018, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He had gone there to obtain documents for his marriage. His death sparked international outrage, with evidence suggesting that he was killed by a team of Saudi agents sent from Riyadh. Investigations indicated that the operation had been ordered at high levels of the Saudi government, leading to widespread condemnation and strained relations between Saudi Arabia and several countries.
