Turkish artist to protest poet sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia

Turkish artist Bedri Baykam will hold a press conference to protest Saudi Arabia’s recent decision to sentence Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh to death.

Baykam, the president of the International Art Association, will hold a press conference at Piramid Sanat in Istanbul’s central Taksim neighborhood at 11:30 a.m. on Dec. 7 to raise awareness about the impending execution.

Fayadh was detained by the country’s religious police in 2013 before being rearrested in 2014 and sentenced to four years in prison and 800 lashes. The sentence, however, was changed to execution upon appeal last month. 

Saudi Arabia’s justice system is based on Sharia Islamic law, and its judges are clerics from the kingdom’s ultra-conservative Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam. In the Wahhabi interpretation of Sharia, religious crimes including blasphemy and apostasy incur the death penalty. 

The United Nations also called on Saudi Arabia on Dec. 3 not to put the poet to death for apostasy. 

“The promotion of such a violent response against a legitimate form of opinion and expression has a widespread chilling effect across all of Saudi society,” said David Kaye, U.N. Special rapporteur on freedom of expression. 

The U.N. statement from Kaye, Christof Heyns, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and four other independent U.N. investigators said the death sentence was based on a collection of poems and testimony from a single witness, who claims he heard Fayadh make blasphemous comments at a cafe.