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Home » Saudi Arabia » Press Releases » KSA - News » Saudi Arabia: Dr. Said bin Zair arbitrarily detained for the past four years
Alkarama took action at that time too, and brought his case before the UN High Commission for Human Rights.
The Saudi authorities, as usual, accused Dr. bin Zair of terrorist acts, without ever specifying precisely what actions he was accused of. This accusation was all the more unjustified in that Dr. bin Zair is known throughout the Arab world, and especially in his country, for his public condemnations of every form of violence and terrorism.
His two sons, Saad and Mubarak, are also being secretly detained in complete isolation for having supported and helped their father and for denouncing the persecutions to which their father had been subjected for more than two decades.
The most recent arrest of Dr. bin Zair undeniably fits with the previous series, and is motivated solely by the Minister of the Interior's desire to silence every free voice in the country and every public personality who does not give unconditional allegiance to the government's official policy.
These successive detentions have had serious consequences for Dr. bin Zair's physical health; he has constantly protested against his arrests and detentions without trial by going on hunger strikes. Today, his family and we fear that these many strikes may damage his health in a irremediable way.
In an opinion issued by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on 21 November 2008, the case of Dr. bin Zair was recognized as constituting arbitrary detention. Since Saudi Arabia has never agreed to cooperate with the working group to remedy this situation, Alkarama again brought the case to the attention of UN experts, calling on them to remind Saudi Arabia of the commitments it undertook for its candidacy to the Human Rights Council (HRC.)
One is forced to ask whether it is legitimate for countries which seriously violate the basic rights of their citizens, such as Saudi Arabia, to have a seat on the HRC. In fact, today nothing prevents such a state from running for the Council and being elected without having ratified the major international human rights treaties and even without respecting the recommendations formulated by the UN's various institutions in this domain.
This situation is tragic in many respects, and Alkarama hopes that measures will be taken in regard to this problem during the coming revisions of the Human Rights Council by the UN General Assembly in autumn 2011.