DUBAI: A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced the editor of an internet forum he founded to discuss the role of religion in the conservative Islamic kingdom to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes, Saudi media reported on Wednesday.
Raif Badawi, who started the “Free Saudi Liberals” website, was originally sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in July last year, but an appeals court overturned the sentence and ordered a retrial.
Apart from imposing a stiffer sentence on Badawi in his retrial, the judge at the criminal court in the Red Sea City of Jeddah also fined him one million riyals ($266,600). Badawi’s website has been closed since his first trial.
His lawyers said that Wednesday’s sentence was too harsh although the prosecutor had demanded a harsher penalty, Sabq reported. The ruling is subject to appeal.
The prosecution had demanded that Badawi be tried for apostasy, a charge which carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The judge in last year’s trial had dismissed the apostasy charges.
Badawi was arrested in June 2012 and charged with cybercrime and disobeying his father — a crime in Saudi Arabia.
His website included articles that were critical of senior religious figures such as Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, according to Human Rights Watch.
The world’s top oil exporter follows the strict Wahhabi school of Islam and applies Islamic law, sharia. Judges base their decisions on their own interpretation of religious law rather than on a written legal code or on precedent.
Rattled by the uprisings that destabilized the Middle East in recent years, Riyadh intensified a crackdown on domestic dissent with arrests and prosecutions.
In April, prominent Saudi rights lawyer and activist Waleed Abu al-Khair was detained incommunicado after appearing in court in Riyadh on sedition charges, according to his wife.
Also in April, a Saudi court sentenced an unidentified activist to six years in jail on charges including taking part in illegal demonstrations and organizing women’s protests.
Another was sentenced to three years in jail for spreading lies against King Abdullah and inciting the public against him.
