According to the human rights organization Reprieve, Ali al-Nimr’s sentence was reduced by the Specialized Criminal Court on Sunday to 10 years in prison.
His father, Mohammed al-Nimr, who attended the hearing in Riyadh, said his son, now 26, should be released within eight or nine months after spending more than nine years “of his childhood and some of his youth”. in prison. .
The cousin of executed firefighter Nimr al-Nimr, Ali al-Nimr, was arrested in 2012 at the age of 17 for participating in protests calling for social and political reform in Saudi Arabia’s troubled Qatif province. He was given a death sentence.
A court later convicted him, among other things, for belonging to a terrorist cell, attacking the police with Molotov cocktails, inciting and fanning sectarianism, according to state media.
Anyone who received a death sentence after being convicted of crimes committed as a minor would face a sentence of no more than 10 years in a juvenile detention center, according to a statement by the state-sponsored Human Rights Commission (HRC) at the time.
“My family and I are happy. I hope that all those arrested in my country and elsewhere will be released,” his father told CNN after Sunday’s ruling. However, he explained that he wished his son had been acquitted by the judges “because he is actually innocent”.
“His health is good, but he has been in prison for more than nine years. He spent more than seven years facing the threat of execution that hung over his head every day, every hour, and every minute. After the sentence, he was in prison. able to breathe. From today he looks forward to freedom, “his father added.
When the royal decree was announced last April, it was hoped that it could potentially spare several men of the country’s Shia minority, who allegedly committed crimes as minors, from the death penalty. Ali al-Nimr is the most prominent of them – with experts from the United Nations and human rights organizations previously urging the Saudi authorities to overturn his death sentence.
It feels strange to talk about progress when a young man has been on death row for nearly a decade for attending a peaceful demonstration, but today’s ruling is clearly a positive step. Ali al-Nimr was now set to be released later this year. But real change isn’t about a few high-profile cases, it means ensuring that no one is ever sentenced to death for a childhood ‘crime’ in Saudi Arabia, ”said Reprieve director Maya Foa.
The organization insisted that the royal decree be urgently applied to the cases of other young people still facing the death penalty, including Abdullah al-Zaher, Dawood al-Marhoon and Mohammed al-Faraj.