Saudi Arabia’s escalating use of the death penalty reached horrifying new levels in 2025. According to data from the official Saudi Press Agency, the authorities executed at least 356 people in 2025, including five women, easily surpassing the previous year’s record total of 345 to set a grim new milestone for the kingdom. Apart from pauses during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in March and from 10 November to 5 December, executions were carried out almost daily. In the absence of transparency – with no publicly accessible record of those executed, and with executions sometimes carried out in secret – the real figures may be even higher. 

More than half of the officially reported executions were for non-lethal drug offences committed by foreign nationals; others were for loosely defined “terrorism” offences, which can include peaceful dissent, or for alleged crimes committed as minors. These applications of the death penalty, in clear violation of international human rights law, underscore the Saudi authorities’ disregard for the right to life and heighten fears for others at risk of imminent execution.

Escalating executions for drug-related offences

Of the 356 individuals publicly reported as having been executed in 2025, 240 were executed for drug-related crimes. This continues a regressive trend that has intensified sharply since 2024: from two individuals executed for such crimes in the whole of 2023 to 122 in 2024, now almost doubling to 240 in 2025. A short-lived moratorium on executions for drug offences that lasted from January 2021 until November 2022 was never consolidated in an official change of policy and has since been comprehensively abandoned. All such executions are in clear violation of international human rights law, which prohibits the use of the death penalty for crimes that fall below the threshold of “the most serious crimes”, involving intentional killing. In particularly stark contrast with this rigorous criterion, more than 40 percent (100) of all executions for drug-related offences in 2025 were linked solely to the smuggling or possession of hashish, a cannabis product use of which is relatively lightly punished, or even decriminalised, in many parts of the world. 

Foreign nationals accounted for the vast majority (187 out of 240) of drug-related executions in 2025, all of them from Asian and African countries: Somalia (39), Ethiopia (35), Pakistan (35), Egypt (22), Afghanistan (17), Jordan (11), Nigeria (10), Syria (7), Iran (6), Sudan (4) and India (1). Rights groups have confirmed, from court documents and testimonies, a pattern of abuses suffered in the course of their arrest, detention and trial. These include lack of access to consular support, legal representation, adequate interpretation and court documents. In many cases, foreign nationals do not receive any translation of the charges against them or are coerced into signing documents they cannot read, leaving them unable to mount an effective legal defence or appeal. Furthermore, some of the foreign nationals executed or currently on death row for drug-related offences are thought likely to have been victims of human trafficking, coerced or deceived into transporting illicit substances under threat or false pretences. However, most of them were not given the chance to plead their innocence in court.

Many remain at risk of imminent execution, living in a state of terror, including Ethiopians and Somalis in Najran Prison, southwestern Saudi Arabia, and Egyptians in Tabuk Prison, northwestern Saudi Arabia. UN experts including the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions have repeatedly called on the Saudi authorities to immediately halt such executions and abolish the death penalty for drug-related offences. 

Executions for “terrorism”-related offences

Furthermore, 45 men were executed in 2025 for “terrorism”-related offences, which, according to the vague and overly broad definition of terrorism in Saudi law, can include a wide range of non-lethal acts. In one such case, Saudi journalist Turki al-Jasser was executed on 14 June under a number of extremely broad and vague charges of “terrorist” crimes including “high treason”. Despite the lack of any further details regarding al-Jasser’s execution – typical of the absence of transparency in Saudi Arabia – his case bears all the hallmarks of a pattern whereby the authorities conflate peaceful dissent with terrorism.

A journalist with Al-Taqrir newspaper, al-Jasser tackled sensitive topics including women’s rights, corruption, and the plight of the Palestinians. He was arrested in March 2018 and for the vast majority of time since was subjected to enforced disappearance, denied any contact with the outside world. His execution, which dramatically illustrates the lengths to which the Saudi authorities will go to suppress peaceful dissent, took place suddenly; neither rights groups nor even his family were aware that he was on death row. This reinforces long-standing concerns raised by NGOs that the true number of individuals at risk of execution—and the overall scale of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia—is likely far greater than what is publicly known or monitored.

21 of the 45 men executed in 2025 for “terrorism”-related offences were from Saudi Arabia’s predominantly Shia Eastern Province, highlighting the disproportionate use of the death penalty as a political weapon against Saudi Shias.

Use of the death penalty for juveniles

The Saudi authorities are also failing to deliver on what have proved to be false promises in relation to the use of the death penalty for juveniles. International human rights law prohibits the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed by people when they were children; however, the executions of Saudi youths Jalal Labbad on 21 August and Abdullah al-Derazi on 20 October, convicted of crimes allegedly committed when they were minors, invalidates the authorities’ claim to have ended this practice. 

Labbad and al-Derazi were convicted on a range of “terrorist” charges, in connection with participation in protests in 2011 and 2012 against the treatment of Saudi Arabia's marginalised Shia community, as well as their attendance at funerals of individuals killed by security forces. Their sentencing followed grossly unfair trials that failed to meet basic standards of due process and relied almost exclusively on confessions extracted under torture. During interrogation, Labbad was severely beaten with pipes, shoes and cables, had his head banged on the table until he passed out, and suffered electrocution and death threats. Similarly, after his arrest al-Derazi was held incommunicado in solitary confinement for several months, during which he was subjected to physical torture including beatings and burns, resulting in broken teeth and a knee injury that required hospitalisation. 

Their executions proceeded despite the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) declaring their detention arbitrary and UN experts repeatedly urging their release. Use of the death penalty against people who were under 18 years of age at the time of the crime of which they are convicted directly violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Saudi Arabia is a party. 

The executions of Labbad and al-Derazi also raise grave fears for other child defendants at imminent risk of execution, including Youssef al-Manasef, Ali al-Mabiyouq, Ali Hassan al-Subaiti, Jawad Qureiris, and Hassan al-Faraj, who have had their death sentences upheld by the Specialised Criminal Court of Appeal.

In 2020, in response to international criticism, the Saudi authorities let it be known that a royal decree had been issued ending judges’ discretion to apply the death penalty when sentencing those convicted for offences committed when they were under 18. However, no such decree was published and its status remained unclear. An unofficial version circulating on social media appeared to leave open serious loopholes by excluding cases brought under the Counter-Terrorism Law and capital crimes under Sharia law. 

In April 2020 the Saudi Human Rights Commission (SHRC), the principal official source on the matter, stated that the decree covered the sentencing of juveniles for any crime, including terrorist offences. If implemented, this would have marked a measure of progress. Six months later, after human rights organisations had publicised the flaws in the still unpublished decree, the SHRC insisted once again that “no one in Saudi Arabia will be executed for a crime committed as a minor”. Yet these official assurances were completely undermined by the execution in June 2021 of Mustafa Hashem al-Darwish for teenage protests, the passing of further death sentences on juvenile offenders between 2022 and 2024, and now the executions of Jalal Labbad and Abdullah al-Derazi in 2025. 

Others at risk of execution

The death penalty is weaponised as part of the authorities’ broader campaign of repression, including as a tool to clamp down on dissent. At least five members of the Huwaitat tribe have been sentenced to death for peacefully resisting the forced displacement of their tribe to make way for the state-backed Neom megacity project. One of those sentenced, Eid Al-Mashouri al-Huwaiti, was in 2025 released from prison. 

Meanwhile, Islamic scholars Salman al-Odah and Hassan Farhan al-Maliki, for whom the Public Prosecutor has been seeking the death penalty on a range of vaguely formulated charges, continue to have their trials drag on for unknown reasons. Both have been arbitrarily detained since September 2017. 

Families left in the dark

In Saudi Arabia the cruelty of execution extends beyond the act itself, as families are frequently prevented from saying goodbye to their loved ones and learn only through the media that an execution has been carried out. They are also often denied the chance to mourn their loved ones in accordance with their religious practices, since the authorities in many cases fail to return victims’ bodies to their families, and fail to inform families of the burial site.

2025 in historical perspective

Saudi Arabia has for years been among the countries carrying out the highest number of executions in the world. Despite a pledge in 2018 from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to reduce use of the death penalty, the rate of executions has continued to soar, apart from a relative lull during the coronavirus pandemic. As recently as March 2022, Mohammed bin Salman repeated the commitment to limit use of the death penalty, yet that year saw a then-record-breaking number of people executed – 196 individuals – which has been significantly surpassed by the tolls in 2024 and 2025. In the absence of transparency, and with executions sometimes carried out in secret, the real figures may be even higher. 

Recommendations: 

ALQST calls on the Saudi authorities to: 

• Implement an immediate moratorium on all executions, with a view to abolishing the death penalty for all crimes;
• Pending full abolition, amend Saudi legislation to remove death penalty provisions that breach international standards, including its use for drug-related offences and vaguely defined “terrorist acts”; 
• Commute the sentences of all those on death row, including child offenders and those convicted of non-lethal offences;
• Ensure full transparency in the publication of execution data and allow independent monitoring of death row conditions; and
• Unconditionally release all those sentenced to death or imprisoned for peacefully exercising their fundamental rights.