The United States and other Western allies have all but rubber-stamped Saudi Arabia’s repression at home and abroad. Repeated U.S. failures to hold Saudi Arabia to account for a litany of human rights violations has emboldened the Saudi government, allowing it to act with unbridled impunity as abuses grow ever more horrifying.
The United States and other Western allies have all but rubber-stamped Saudi Arabia’s repression at home and abroad. Repeated U.S. failures to hold Saudi Arabia to account for a litany of human rights violations has emboldened the Saudi government, allowing it to act with unbridled impunity as abuses grow ever more horrifying.
In late August, Human Rights Watch reported in gruesome detail how Saudi forces are killing hundreds of migrants, including women and children, on the remote, mountainous border with Yemen. Researchers documented Saudi border guards using explosive weapons against Ethiopian migrants and asylum-seekers attempting to cross into Saudi Arabia. The attacks are widespread and systematic.
Details in the evidence collected by Human Rights Watch are utterly devastating: “From 150, only seven people survived that day,” a survivor said. “There were remains of people everywhere, scattered everywhere.” A 17-year-old boy said border guards forced him and other survivors to rape two girls after the guards had executed another migrant who refused to rape another girl.
The violations detailed in this report are a dramatic escalation in both the number and manner of targeted killings. Arbitrary detention, torture, and ill-treatment by Saudi forces were commonplace along this route, but never before have we seen the systematic killing of unarmed migrants, including women and children, on this scale.
The Saudi government has never faced meaningful consequences for prior abuses committed in plain sight and thoroughly documented. Indeed, U.S. authorities had been briefed on the killings of migrants at the Yemeni-Saudi border for more than a year.
At only 38, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is just a few short years into what may be a decadeslong reign and yet has already overseen one of the worst periods for human rights in the country’s modern history. Each year, Saudi Arabia’s abuses under his rule metastasize further as the U.S. government fails, again and again, to follow through on threats to hold him to account, all the wh
