Judicial overkilling
Saudi watch , Issue 1675 IN Saudi Arabia's Khamis Mushait prison, 200 Ethiopian men are awaiting execution. Most were sentenced in mass trials without legal representation, according to Ethiopia's Tigray Youth Affairs Bureau.

Sixty-five men face the most imminent risk: three of their group were taken out on 21 April, told they were going to court but were instead then executed.

Distrust the process
Their convictions relate to drug offences. Many had brought khat – a legal, commonly chewed mild stimulant in Ethiopia – into the kingdom, where it is illegal.

The men had no chance to tell the court they didn't know it was illegal, nor say anything else for that matter, because after arrest they were beaten until they signed documents they didn't understand.

Court proceedings were also conducted in a language they didn't understand; they only saw a translator when their death sentences were pronounced, the judge adding that they would be "an example to others".

Status issues
The men are migrants who entered the kingdom irregularly to find work – a risky but common approach: there are more than 750,000 Ethiopians in Saudi Arabia, about 60 percent of them irregular migrants.

The kingdom relies on migrant workers – they make up 89 percent of its workforce – and it presumably suits the country's elite to have a plentiful supply of cheap labourers unable to demand a decent wage when they have no legal right to be there.

But this doesn't stop them falling fall foul of Saudi Arabia's oppressive judicial system.

Broken pledge
Human rights group Reprieve says migrant men made up 78 percent of the kingdom's 240 executions for non-violent drug offences in 2025.

They're the key driver accelerating the rate of executions: 2,000 since King Salman took the throne in 2015, but half of these in the last four years, despite Chief Sportswasher Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's public promise of reform and modernisation and his 2018 pledge (repeated in 2022) to execute fewer people.

Mass sentencing
Reprieve says the kingdom kills vulnerable migrants because "elite Saudis" have a drugs problem.

That may be true; but the almost casual mass capital sentencing for non-violent offences by judges who understand perfectly well due process and the unreliability of confession under duress suggests the kingdom regards the poor migrants it relies on to function as less deserving of justice and humanity than its own citizens.

Two-tier justice
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has asked the Saudi authorities to stop such killings because they violate international legal norms. But the fundamental human rights principle on which these norms are based – that all human lives have equal value – simply isn't one Saudi Arabia appears to recognise.

Something to remember if you're thinking of visiting the Fifa World Cup there in 2034 but don't happen to be one of the Saudi elite.

‘Dr Grim'