Saudi Arabia jails seven for inciting protests on Facebook

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/30/saudi-arabia-jails-seven-protests

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Saudi Arabia has sentenced seven activists from its restive Eastern province to prison terms ranging from five to 10 years for posting messages on Facebook calling for anti-government protests, according to Human Rights Watch.

The New York-based rights group urged the EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and other European officials who were meeting with Gulf counterparts in Manama on Sunday to condemn the convictions.

Eastern province has seen occasional protests by minority Shia Muslims over the past two years against alleged discrimination and negligence, which the Riyadh government denies.

A Saudi-based human rights campaigner said the activists were all Shias from al-Ahsa governorate who had set up Facebook pages to urge people to stage demonstrations. "The sectarian situation in the region made the sentences tough and unreasonable," he said.

Human Rights Watch said the seven men were detained in September 2011 and spent a year and a half in prison before being tried by a special tribunal set up in 2008 to handle terrorism-related cases.

The court did not charge the men with directly participating in the protests, HRW said, but with inciting "protests, illegal gathering, and breaking allegiance with the king".

Saudi Arabia moved swiftly in early 2011 to quell protests by minority Shias over the deployment of Saudi forces to nearby Bahrain to help crush anti-government demonstrations there. A majority of Bahraini citizens are Shia.

But discontent lingers on with occasional protests in eastern Saudi Arabia, where at least 20 people have been killed by security forces since 2011. On Thursday thousands of Shias protested against the kingdom's ruling al-Saud family at the funeral of a wanted man shot dead by police, an incident that ended months of relative calm in the province.

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