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Mr Alwan, who is imprisoned in al-Tarafiah prison in al-Qasim, was summoned to attend court on 14 October 2012 by Judge Salah al-Ujairi of the Specialist Penal Court in Riyadh, in order to be informed of the charges against him. This is the first time that the Saudi justice system deemed it necessary to deal with his case, after a detention without any legal basis which lasted more than 8 years. He refused to comply with the request because of his lack of confidence in Saudi justice and in protest at the absence of an independent judiciary.
Mr Alwan, aged 43 years old, was arrested in April 2004 by members of Saudi Intelligence services who dragged him to the Ministry of the Interior in order to make false confession under torture. That was the start of his journey of suffering, prisons and detention centres, as he was moved from the Ministry of the Interior to al-Hayer prison and then to al-Tarafiah prison.
The specialist criminal court was established in 2008 in order to review security cases as requested by the Ministry of the Interior, which did not want these types of cases handled by normal courts. It is made up of judges that are appointed by the Minister for the Interior so that their loyalty can be guaranteed and so that they can be relied upon to produce sentences as instructed. In fact, Mr Salah al-Ujairi, the judge responsible for the case of Mr Alwan is the same judge who sentenced Dr Saud al-Hashimi, a winner of the 2012 Alkarama Award, to 30 years in prison.
Alkarama can only guess at the real numbers of prisoners who are detained arbitrarily in the country, as the case of Mr Alwan is not unique or isolated, but just one example of the arbitrary detention practised by the Saudi authorities systematically and on a wide scale. According to the reports by local and international organisations, the number of those that are arbitrarily detained is in the thousands, and Alkarama alone has documented hundreds of cases during the current year only, with many individuals having already endured 8 years without any legal proceedings.