Rights Team Allegations Refuted
RIYADH: DIRECTOR General of Prisons Major General Ali Al-Harithi has refuted the allegations of the US-based Human Rights Watch that they were denied access to prisons.
A Human Rights Watch team visited Al-Hayer Prison in southern Riyadh and met the inmates for more than five hours, Al-Harithi told the Arabic language daily Al-Hayat.HRW said it sent a team to Saudi Arabia last month on the first extensive mission.
“Senior Saudi officials have been generous with their time. But the true measure of transparency is a willingness to grant independent investigators full and confidential access to detainees in a range of facilities,†HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said in a statement obtained Tuesday.
The group called for full access to prisons, women’s and juvenile detention facilities, and shelters for foreign women in Buraida, Dammam, Jeddah, Najran and Riyadh.
According to this article appearing in Saudi Gazette, and contrary to the HRW report noted earlier, the group was able to visit prisons.
Whether it was all the prisons it wished to visit or under specific conditions it might have preferred are unaddressed in this piece, however.
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December:19:2006 - 22:14
[...] According to Rasheed’s post, “Human Rights Watch issued a press statement yesterday [December 19th] about how their delegation that was here in the Kingdom last week were denied access to many detention facilities that they had wanted to visit here [in Saudi Arabia].” Crossroads Arabia, however, sheds some light on other claims regarding the visit; according to an article on the Saudi Gazette, HRW “was able to visit prisons.” Aya thinks that they were -genuinely- denied access to prison and detention facilities. “I don’t think that HRW actually expected to be granted full access to the country, for God’s sake, even its ‘contact us’ page is blocked in the kingdom,” she says. [...]