Saudi jails Egypt psychiatrist on terror charges following salary dispute, HRW reveals

Saudi Arabia jailed an Egyptian psychiatrist on charges of terrorism last year in an “unfair trial” due to a salary dispute that he won in the kingdom, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has revealed.

According to the rights group, 66-year-old Egyptian psychiatrist Sabri Shalabi – who was employed by the Saudi Ministry of Health between 2006 and 2019 – had won a court case against the kingdom’s authorities to receive years of unpaid compensation that he was owed, after he discovered that he was paid far less than other colleagues.

In January 2020, however, days before an appeals court decision in his civil case, plainclothes police officers – without a warrant – took him from his home in the north-west of the country, confiscated his devices and his wife’s passport and detained him.

Shalabi was sentenced last year to 20 years in jail under article 34 of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism law for “expressing sympathy with a terrorist organisation” and 12 years under article 33 for “joining a terrorist organisation”, in reference to the Muslim Brotherhood.

An appeals court later reduced the sentence to ten years for allegedly “expressing sympathy” for the political movement and dropped the other charge.

READ: Saudi arrests prominent cleric Badr Al-Meshari under mysterious circumstances

Rather than basing the charges on actual or overt affiliation to the Brotherhood, however, there are significant suspicions that Saudi Arabia arrested, detained and charged Shalabi due to his successful attempt to challenge authorities regarding the compensation he was owed from his salary dispute.

According to HRW, “Saudi prosecutors based the charges largely on forced confessions and apparently in retaliation for a work-related dispute”, with the accusations by the Saudi government highlighting yet another case of the kingdom’s use of its wide and vague counterterrorism laws to silence challengers.

“Saudi Arabia’s record of politically motivated prosecutions raises grave concerns that Sabri Shalabi may have been targeted in reprisal for claiming money the government owed him,” HRW researcher Joey Shea stated in the report. “The Saudi legal system shows no sign of halting its use of vague provisions of the counterterrorism law to criminalize a wide range of peaceful acts that bear no relation to terrorism.”