Saudi blogger's flogging 'to resume', says wife

Ensaf Haidar, exiled wife of Raif Badawi, says she has been warned her husband will receive the next round of lashes soon.

 Saudi Arabia is to resume the flogging of Raif Badawi, the blogger whose first 50 lashes became the centre of an international outcry, his wife says she has been told.

Ensaf Haidar, who is now living in Canada with the couple’s children, said the same “informed source” who originally tipped her off to the flogging of her husband in January had told her the punishment was about to resume.

If the statement is true, it will be a snub to Britain, which privately and publicly has intervened in the case, and especially the Prince of Wales, regarded as one of the kingdom’s “oldest friends”, who raised Mr Badawi’s case personally with King Salman on a visit in February.

It may also be a response to the government's decision to drop a contract with the Saudi prison system worth £5.9 million, believed to have been taken in protest at Saudi Arabia's human rights record.

The flogging, which was suspended after the first 50 of 1,000 lashes were administered for health reasons, has not been resumed since.

“I was informed by an informed source, that the Saudi authorities have given the green light to the resumption of Raif Badawi’s flogging,” Mrs Haidar said, in a statement on a website set up in honour of her husband.

“The informed source also said that the flogging will resume soon but will be administered inside the prison.”

Mr Badawi was a liberal who was part of a brief flowering of dissent and political debate in the kingdom in the last decade.

That came to an abrupt halt with the Arab Spring, when liberals were seen as more of a threat to ruling regimes around the region rather than as a bulwark against hardline Islamism.

Mr Badawi, who ran a blog and wrote articles in particular criticising the country’s religious establishment, was arrested in May 2012 and sentenced in May last year to ten years in prison, a 10-year travel ban, and a ban on appearing on media outlets, as well as the 1,000 lashes.

The first 50 of the lashes were administered in a public square in Jeddah in January, and prompted international concern. The UN commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Al-Hussein, called the sentence “cruel and inhuman punishment”, while key Saudi allies Britain and America also issued statements of concern.

After the Prince of Wales’s intervention, it was hinted to journalists that King Salman may have used his ruler’s prerogative to intervene to suspend the flogging.

However, since then, relations between Britain and Saudi Arabia have soured.

Earlier this month, Michael Gove, the justice secretary, announced he was cancelling a contract to provide training to the Saudi prisons system, in theory part of its reform process.

Although no reason was given, it was widely held to be a response to a campaign in another prominent human rights case, that of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, a Saudi Shia sentenced to death by beheading and crucifixion for taking part in protests when he was just 17, in 2012. That campaign was led by Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader.

In Monday’s Daily Telegraph, the Saudi ambassador to London reacted with fury to the suspension, accusing Mr Corbyn of “breaching respect” and demanding that issues of internal policies and trade be kept separate.

The resumption of Mr Badawi’s flogging may be a response to that campaign.

Mrs Haidar added: “I do not understand this decision especially as Raif’s case is still being reviewed by the supreme court according to a senior source in the Saudi Ministry of Justice and according to the statement of UK Foreign Office minister, Tobias Ellwood, who told the House of Commons in July that my husband’s case was still being examined by Saudi judges.”

She has warned that Mr Badawi may not be physically strong enough to bear the full punishment, even if as planned it is spread out over 20 weeks.

“I call on his Majesty King Salman to gracefully end my husband’s ordeal and to pardon him,” she added. “I also appeal to his Majesty to allow him to be deported to Canada to be reunited with his family and children, who have been deprived of their father for more than four years.”

There was no immediate response from either the Saudi Arabian embassy or the ministry of the interior.