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Saudi Arabia - Human
Rights Watch Urges Saudi King to Spare Woman Convicted of 'Witchcraft'
Agence France-Presse - 15 February, 2008
Human
Rights Watch appealed to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on Thursday to spare the
life of a woman who was condemned to death for "witchcraft".
"King Abdullah should halt the execution of Fawza Falih and void her
conviction for 'witchcraft,'" the New York-based HRW, adding it had
delivered the appeal in a letter to the Saudi king.
"The religious police who arrested and interrogated Fawza Falih and the
judges who tried her in the northern town of Quraiyat never gave her the
opportunity to prove her innocence against absurd charges," it said.
"The fact that Saudi judges still conduct trials for unprovable crimes
like witchcraft' underscores their inability to carry out objective criminal
investigations," said Joe Stork, the Middle East director at HRW.
It charged that the judges relied on Falih's "coerced confession and on
the statements of witnesses who said she had 'bewitched' them to convict
her" in April 2006, following her arrest in May 2005.
Falih had "retracted her confession in court, claiming it was extracted
under duress, and that as an illiterate woman she did not understand the
document she was forced to fingerprint", said HRW.
"At one point, she had to be hospitalised as a result of beatings" at
the hands of the religious police, called the "mutaween" in the
ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim kingdom, it said.
HRW said: "The judges never investigated whether her confession was
voluntary or reliable, or investigated her allegations of torture.
"They never even made an inquiry as to whether she could have been
responsible for allegedly supernatural occurrences, such as the sudden
impotence of a man she is said to have 'bewitched'."
HRW said that an appeals court had ruled Falih could not be sentenced to death
for "witchcraft" as a crime against God because she had retracted her
confession.
She had been condemned to death in April 2006 for "witchcraft, recourse to
jinn (supernatural beings), and slaughter" of animals, it said.
But lower court judges then sentenced her to death "on a 'discretionary'
basis, for the benefit of 'public interest' and to 'protect the creed, souls
and property of this country'", it said.
HRW did not specify Falih's nationality but referred in its letter to the king
to her relatives in Jordan.
In November, Egyptian pharmacist Mustapha Ibrahim, who worked in the northern
city of Arar, was beheaded by the sword for "sorcery" under Saudi
Arabia's strict Islamic laws for allegedly trying to separate a married couple.
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