Raif Badawi has been released from prison after serving his sentence in Saudi Arabia. According to some sources, he cannot leave the country because he does not have Canadian citizenship. The House of Commons and the Senate passed a motion to recognize Raif Badawi as a Canadian citizen. What’s going on ?
Richard Champagne
Raif Badawi has been going through a real ordeal for 10 years… which is anything but over.
In 2012, he was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for daring to share his political opinions (about religion and women’s rights, for example) on a blog.
What is mentioned less often is that under the judgment, he was also prohibited from leaving Saudi Arabia for 10 years from the time he had completed his prison sentence.
This is the reason why he cannot come and join his wife and children, who are in Sherbrooke. He remains trapped by the Saudi regime.
Now let’s talk about motions. There were indeed two, adopted last year in Ottawa, to grant him Canadian citizenship.
The first was tabled by the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, in the House of Commons, and the second by independent senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, in the Senate.
But the federal government has not yet acted in this direction. Bloc Québécois MP Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe deplores this. He believes that the time has come to grant Canadian citizenship to Raif Badawi. “His children, his wife and his lawyers are asking for it,” he says.
The parliamentarian explains that if Raif Badawi were a Canadian citizen, he could notably benefit from consular services – which would be offered by allied countries since Ottawa does not have an embassy in Saudi Arabia.
On the other hand, even if Raif Badawi had already had Canadian citizenship, “it would not have changed the fact that he could leave Saudi Arabia because it is part of his sentence”, specifies Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe.
Colette Lelièvre, of Amnesty International, also believes that the advantages linked to the eventual attribution of Canadian citizenship to Raif Badawi are limited.
“It would put the spotlight back on the case, but it might not play that much in the negotiations,” she said. Especially since “Saudi Arabia does not recognize dual citizenship”.
Raif Badawi’s best hope therefore remains diplomacy. This is the only real potential solution to get him out of Saudi Arabia and welcome him to Canada. Negotiate with the regime of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
But two things should be noted about this. First, Mohammed bin Salman seems to care about human rights as much as dictators like Kim Jong-un or Bashar al-Assad. That is to say not at all.
He was even implicated in the atrocious assassination of journalist Jamal Kashoggi, dismembered in a Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey in 2018. That says a lot about his true nature.
Second, he usually has the upper end of the stick in his diplomatic dealings. Its oil and its money often overcome the moral principles of the most virtuous countries.
These are major obstacles, but that does not mean that, in Canada and elsewhere in the world, we must stop being indignant and mobilizing for justice to be done.