Reporter executed in Saudi Arabia for tweet against Royal family

Saudi Arabia murdered more than 330 individuals in 2024 alone, human rights estimates suggest. And in this, the execution of a reporter for tweets is no exception—it's a message, writes Edinbox senior scribe Nibedita.

Journalism is not terrorism. A tweet is not treason. And Turki Al-Jasser should have lived to pen many more of them.

In an era where a single blog can be used to magnify truth or opposition, journalism and treason are becoming indistinguishable from each other—at least in Saudi Arabia. The recent beheading of journalist Turki Al-Jasser on charges of spreading his opinions on the internet has left the world of journalism and the universe of human rights gasping in its aftermath. It is not only a haunting tale of power abuse, but a sort of amnesia at how totalitarian regimes still view speaking truth to be punished as a crime.

Al-Jasser, an old journalist in his late 40s, was picked up in 2018. His offense? Tweets criticizing corruption, women's rights, and the threat that militant groups posed—most of them tweeted anonymously. Human rights organization Reprieve says he was tried in secret and sentenced to death, whose sentence was recently carried out. His offense, they claim, was "just journalism."

This case frighteningly recalls the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist murdered within the Saudi consulate in Istanbul—a killing American intelligence believes was sanctioned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The international outcry at the time was so promising. But seven years on, not much has changed. If anything, the room for dissent has narrowed further.

The Saudi government still functions under the cover of anti-terrorism, employing lax legislation to muzzle criticism. From a Bank of America staff member imprisoned for a tweet he deleted to dual citizen U.S.-Saudi Saad Almadi found guilty for tweets because he had been resident in the U.S., it is apparent that speech online is being criminalized—even retroactively.

Turki Al-Jasser was not a criminal. He was a responsible journalist, who defied silence in an arena where silence is dictated by weapons. The fact that his trial was held in secrecy, where nobody knows anything about it, indicates the institutionalized erosion of transparency.

This is not only a Saudi problem. This is an observation of how the world still facilitates such regimes with silence and transactional foreign policy. When governments and corporations value transactions more than human rights, they enable authoritarianism.