Ghomgham, a group of five Shiite Muslim activists from Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province are currently on trial and facing death penalty in a secretive terrorism court in Saudi Arabia.
The kingdom’s public prosecutor behind the charges who reports directly to King Salman and “by proxy” his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said, the charges against the group include incitement to protest, chanting slogans hostile to the regime, attempting to inflame public opinion, and providing moral support to rioters.
The crown prince, who is widely seen as the power behind the throne, has been on an intense international public relations campaign to tout the kingdom’s efforts to transform the Saudi economy and return the deeply conservative society to “moderate” Islam.
Women have been granted permission to drive and more freely work outside the home, and the country’s fearsome religious police have been defanged.
Meanwhile, President United States of America Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, have embraced the crown prince as a close and crucial partner in the administration’s Middle East strategy.
In his first foreign trip as president, to Saudi Arabia ,Trump, said” an absolute monarchy where political parties and protests are banned”
But a recent wave of detentions of intellectuals, clerics, journalists and women’s rights campaigners has alarmed rights workers around the world as well as some Saudi allies. Canada’s call in early August for the immediate release of Saudi women’s rights activists within days spiraled into a full-blown diplomatic crisis.
The prosecution of Ghomgham was reported earlier this week by Berlin-based European-Saudi Organisation for Human Rights and ALQST, a London-based rights group.
The charges are related to Ghomgham’s involvement in huge demonstrations in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, where most of the country’s Shiites live that started in 2011.
She was arrested in December 2015 with her husband, who is was also charged.
Also shiites have long complained of widespread discrimination by Sunni Muslim authorities, who deny unfairly cracking down on the minority.
The Saudi government also accuses arch-rival Iran of being behind unrest.
In Jan. 2, 2016, Saudi authorities executed 47 prisoners including Nimr al-Nimr, a revered Shiite cleric and government critic from the Eastern Province who had been convicted of sedition and other charges.
