Undue Process: Saudi Arabia Executing Ethiopian Migrants for Carrying Plant Legal in Their Home Country

Three men were taken from their cell at Khamis Mushait prison in southern Saudi Arabia on the morning of April 21. Guards told them they were going to a court hearing. They never came back. Fellow detainees were later informed the men had been executed and told to contact their families.The announcement sent panic through the remaining prisoners: approximately 65 other Ethiopian men in the same cell, all sentenced to death for drug-related offenses, along with Saudi men held for murder and other serious crimes.Saudi authorities executed the three Ethiopian nationals on April 21, after the kingdom’s Ministry of Interior announced they had been convicted of “participating in smuggling hashish.” At least 65 additional Ethiopians now face imminent execution at the same facility on drug-related charges, according to a Human Rights Watch report published April 28.Many of those on death row faced brief group trials without legal representation or adequate translation services. Human Rights Watch, drawing on accounts from informed sources, says the men were convicted of transporting khat — a mild stimulant plant whose active compound, cathinone, is banned in Saudi Arabia yet legally permissible and culturally consumed across Ethiopia and Yemen.The Saudi government, however, listed the charge as hashish smuggling — a discrepancy that rights groups say reflects a broader pattern of opaque and unreliable official characterizations of drug cases involving foreign nationals. Sources told Human Rights Watch that none of the men knew carrying khat into Saudi Arabia was illegal.The executions have generated almost no attention in Western capitals, even as Saudi Arabia continues its lavish charm offensive — sports deals, diplomatic summits, and Vision 2030 branding — before a largely receptive global audience.“Saudi Arabia’s willingness to execute foreign migrants for nonviolent offenses following trials that denied them basic due process reflects a profound disregard for their rights and lives,” said Nadia Hardman, senior refugee and migrant rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Saudi Arabia’s partners should urgently intervene before it is too late.”The case raises a question with no easy answer: When a substance is legal in one country and a capital offense in another, where does culpability begin and end?Trials Without Translation, Sentences Without AppealSaudi security authorities arrested the three executed men between 2023 and 2024 in the Abaha region while they were working, then transferred them through various detention facilities before ultimately placing them at Khamis Mushait. What happened inside the courtroom, critics contend, amounts to a mockery of due process by any legal standard.The men had two or three extremely brief group hearings, some conducted by video link, with no legal representation or translators, and none were told the charges against them.Security officials allegedly beat the men during the hearings and forced them to sign documents they did not understand. A translator appeared only in the final hearing — solely to inform them they had been found guilty of drug smuggling and condemned to death.The men were then held at Khamis Mushait for over two years with no opportunity to appeal and no set execution date. Reports from Tigray’s Youth Affairs Bureau suggest the scale is far larger than confirmed figures: Officials say 64 detainees in “Block 5” alone face imminent execution, while another 150 are held in other prison blocks. Media reports have placed the total number of Ethiopians awaiting execution at the facility above 200, though Human Rights Watch said it could not independently verify the full figure.The pattern at Khamis Mushait is far from isolated, human rights monitor Nadyeen Abdulaziz tells the New York Sun.“Testimonies from cases involving foreign nationals sentenced to death for drug-related offenses reveal a consistent pattern of due process violations, including restricted access to legal representation, insufficient interpretation, and confessions obtained through torture,” says Ms. Abdulaziz, Monitoring Officer at ALQST, an independent Saudi human rights organization. “Families are frequently not informed prior to executions and are denied the right to repatriate the bodies, preventing them from conducting burial rites in accordance with their traditions.”The Saudi government has previously characterized such cases as lawful enforcement of its narcotics statutes. Saudi Arabia’s 2005 Law on Combating Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, backed by a 1987 fatwa from the kingdom’s Council of Senior Religious Scholars, explicitly prescribes the death penalty for drug smuggling.In submissions to United Nations human rights bodies, Saudi officials have argued that their courts accord full procedural safeguards to defendants, that no sentence is carried out in secret, and that the law is applied consistently to protect public order and societal stability.Riyadh has dismissed human rights findings as part of what it describes as a campaign to target the kingdom as it seeks to modernize, and the Interior Ministry has appealed for public tips related to drug violations, with Saudi media routinely carrying stories blaming “Ethiopian violators of border rules” for drug dealings. Riyadh has not publicly responded to the April 28 Human Rights Watch report.Executions: By the NumbersThe executions of the three Ethiopian men on April 21 did not occur in a vacuum. Saudi Arabia set a new record for executions in 2024 with 345, then broke it again in 2025 with 356, with executions of foreign nationals for nonlethal drug crimes driving the surge. In 2025, nonlethal drug-related offenses account for approximately 68 percent of total executions. Of the 597 people executed for drug-related offenses between January 2014 and June 2025, foreign nationals made up nearly three-quarters.The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention condemned Saudi Arabia’s practice, finding that executions for drug offenses are incompatible with international human rights law and fall outside the scope of the “most serious crimes,” and urged authorities to reinstate a moratorium. Nothing changed. Despite a 2018 pledge by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to significantly curtail the use of the death penalty, executions have accelerated — including executions of child defendants and politically motivated killings — and the kingdom has now executed more than 2,000 people since King Salman took the throne in 2015.“Saudi Arabia’s executions of vulnerable migrants for non-lethal offences and their use of torture to extract confessions puts the Kingdom squarely in breach of international human rights laws,” Jeed Basyouni, Head of Middle East and North Africa Death Penalty projects for advocacy organization Reprieve, tells the Sun.“Migrants in Saudi Arabia are intensely vulnerable, facing social isolation and extreme legal dependency upon their employer,” Ms. Basyouni continues. “On top of that, many foreign workers imprisoned and executed for drug offenses come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, and are often forced to smuggle drugs across the border.“It’s essential that the international community puts pressure on Mohammed bin Salman to abide by his human rights commitments. But so long as Western governments rely on its oil, arms purchases and strategic position in the Gulf, the Saudi government knows that they can continue to kill vulnerable foreign workers with impunity.”Traffickers’ Pawns?Many of those now awaiting execution at Khamis Mushait arrived in Saudi Arabia not as smugglers but as refugees. Three of the men whose cases were documented by Human Rights Watch said they were refugees who had fled the 2020-2022 armed conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.Human traffickers operating along the Yemen-Saudi corridor forced migrants to carry khat from Yemen into Saudi Arabia as a condition of facilitating the journey, meaning men who may have had no meaningful choice now face the death penalty for a substance they grew up consuming freely.Some of the Ethiopian and Somali nationals on death row for drug-related offenses are reported to be likely victims of human trafficking, coerced or deceived into transporting illicit substances. Yet, most were never given the chance to plead their innocence in court.The Eastern Route, connecting the Horn of Africa to the Gulf States through Yemen, is the most active and dangerous migration corridor for Ethiopians. Outward movements along the route increased approximately 18 percent between 2024 and 2025, rising from 430,200 to 506,600 people, while deaths and disappearances nearly doubled, reaching 922 individuals in 2025 compared to 558 the previous year, according to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.The international response has been measured at best. Saudi Arabia is a critical energy supplier, an arms customer, and a regional partner of the United States and major European powers. President Trump’s visit to Riyadh in May 2025 — the first major state trip of his second term — underlined the depth of the strategic relationship, with the two sides signing a strategic economic partnership and a $142 billion defense cooperation agreement.None of that calculus included the men in Block 5. The International Organization for Migration and the Mixed Migration Center, both of which monitor violations against migrants along the Eastern Route, have noted that even when Saudi Arabia’s conduct is documented and exposed, resulting media coverage has been widespread but short-lived, with little sustained political pressure or accountability.What stands, for now, is a prison block in southern Saudi Arabia where men who fled a war, crossed a desert, and carried a plant wait to find out whether they will live or die — with no lawyer, no translator, and no government willing to speak loudly enough to matter.

Undue Process: Saudi Arabia Executing Ethiopian Migrants for Carrying Plant Legal in Their Home Country

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