New
commercial arm of justice ministry hopes to sell expertise to country under
scrutiny over beheadings and floggings
theguardian.com,
Emma Graham-Harrison and David Batty, Sunday 25 January 2015
 |
| Raif Badawi, the blogger sentenced 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes for advocating freedom of expression. Photograph: Handout |
The
Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is hoping to profit from selling its expertise to the
prison service in Saudi Arabia, a country notorious for public beheadings,
floggings, amputations and courts that regularly violate human rights.
A new
commercial arm of the UK justice ministry, staffed by civil servants, has bid
for a £5.9m contract in Saudi Arabia. Just Solutions international (JSi) will
soon start setting up a probation service in Macedonia, and is also in the
running to build a prison in Oman.
Human
rights groups have raised concerns about the MoJ working so closely with a
regime currently under scrutiny over the botched execution of a woman who died protesting her innocence and the harsh punishment meted out to a liberal blogger.
Allan
Hogarth, Amnesty’s UK head of policy and government affairs, said: “Amnesty has
serious concerns about Saudi Arabia’s justice system, given its use of the
death penalty, the prevalence of torture in detention, and its use of cruel and
degrading punishment.
“So we need
to know – how is the MoJ’s scheme going to help improve the situation?”
The
ministry said that all JSi projects had to be signed off by the Foreign Office
and the local embassy after an evaluation that covered human rights, but
declined to provide further details on the grounds that the project was
“commercially sensitive”.
A spokesman
said full details of the contract, including human rights safeguards, will be
made public if JSi is successful, although the organisation’s website does not
carry details of any previous deals won by it.
The JSi bid
was featured in a December report to parliament that also gave details of a
memorandum of understanding on judicial cooperation signed by the UK and Saudi
Arabian justice ministers in Riyadh in September.
It said the
contract would be “to conduct a training needs analysis across all the learning
and development programmes within the Saudi Arabian prison service”.
Like all
the overseas projects run by JSi, it aims to raise funds for the National
Offender Management Service, which runs prisons and probation services in
England and Wales.
Saudi
Arabia’s justice system has faced international outcry since the activist Raif Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes for advocating freedom
of expression. He has had only 50 lashes so far, and judges have twice delayed
the next round of punishment after medical assessements.
This and
the botched execution are just two cases among many that make working with the
Saudi Arabian justice system extremely challenging, human rights groups have
said. They have called for greater transparency about both the way the system
works and the safeguards in place to prevent miscarriages of justice.
“Quiet
training programmes are not a substitute for active British engagement with the
Saudi authorities on human rights abuses in the justice system,” said Adam
Coogle, Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch. “We find that pressure
works better when Saudi abuses are in the international spotlight. They don’t
usually tend to back down because someone has a private conversation. Public
advocacy is necessary.”
It is also
unclear how much money JSi will be able to earn for the justice ministry, or
whether that income will come at the expense of other services, as there are no
public accounts for the organisation.
The report
to parliament said that JSi would generate more than half a million pounds “in
revenue” for the government, but gave no details of the organisation’s
outgoings.
A spokesman
for the MoJ refused to clarify whether staff working at JSi had been assigned
from other jobs, and if so, whether they were replaced. He also declined to say
whether any of the staff had commercial experience.
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