Areej Al-Sadhan, the sister of Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan, a Red Cross worker who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Saudi Arabia for having an anonymous satirical twitter account, testified at the trial of a former Twitter employee who was convicted in a US court of spying for the Saudi authorities.
On 09 August 2022, Ahmad Abouammo, a dual U.S.-Lebanese citizen who was a manager at Twitter, was convicted on six out of 11 charges, including “acting as an agent for Saudi Arabia” and “trying to disguise a payment from an official” linked to the Saudi royal family. He could face 10 or more years in prison for passing information to the Saudis about 6,000 Twitter accounts.
Following the conviction, Areej Al-Sadhan said, “I could only think about how my brother is so far away from us, in pain & alone, & the hundreds of other families suffering just like us…” Al-Sadhan has been denied contact with his family for months at a time.
Areej Al-Sadhan’s testimony was crucial to the trial, which linked Abouammo directly to a key aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has overseen the arrest and imprisonment of human rights defenders and online activists as well as the murder in 2018 of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. She said that the former Twitter employee is responsible for many of the violations by the Saudi government, including the arrest, torture and disappearance of her brother, but she was not allowed to provide details of her brother’s torture in court.
The court case revealed that Abouammo was allegedly bribed with cash and luxury items in exchange for the personal information of thousands of Twitter users such as Al-Sadhan, who criticised the Saudi royal family on Twitter.
In court, Areej Al-Sadhan was shown a list compiled in 2015 by the crown prince’s aide, Bader Al-Asaker of 10 Twitter handles that he wanted Abouammo to track. One of them was her brother Abdulrahman, and another was Omar Abdulaziz, a friend of Khashoggi.
Al-Sadhan was sentenced to 20 years in prison during a hearing held on 05 April 2021 by the Specialised Criminal Court (SCC) in Riyadh. The SCC is the terrorism court that Saudi Arabia established in 2008 to put on trial members of terrorist groups but has since been used to imprison human rights defenders and activists. On 12 March 2018, Al-Sadhan was arrested at the offices of the Saudi Red Crescent Society in Riyadh, where he works as an aid worker.
The Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) is concerned about the various methods that the Saudi authorities use to arrest and harass online activists or silence online discussion, including the use of electronic flies, in addition to surveillance. The General Directorate of Investigation (Al-Mabahith), under direct orders from Mohammed bin Salman, established electronic intelligence committees composed of large numbers of electronic flies using Twitter accounts to incite attacks on independent voices calling for reform and to call for the arrest of popular Twitter users who were being monitored.
Recommendations
- GCHR calls on social media companies, namely Twitter and Facebook, to further enhance the protection of online activists who are promoting human rights in troubled regions such as the MENA region. They must put in place safeguards to make sure that accounts of activists are safe and their personal information is not accessible by anybody.
- GCHR further calls on the Saudi authorities to release Internet activists, including Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan, who has been imprisoned in direct violation of his right to freedom of expression.
