Bin Salman has presented himself as a reformer, but in a recent interview with CBS News, during a visit to the US, he said: “We believe in the notion of human rights, but ultimately Saudi standards are not the same as American standards.”
“On average, the Saudi authorities currently execute someone more or less every two days," Wake told MEE. "Though rulers like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman trumpet supposed ‘reforms’ - Saudi executioners are as busy now as tey were two years ago."
Amnesty said that authorities in Saudi Arabia also “routinely failed to inform families of their relatives’ imminent execution”.
The group pointed to the execution of Yussuf Ali al-Mushaikhass on 11 July - alongside three other men - in connection with anti-government protests in the Eastern Province in 2011 and 2012. His family only found out about his death following a government announcement on television, the group said.
At least 125 executions were carried out in Iraq, compared to 88 in 2016, all by authorities in central Iraq.
The death penalty continued to be used as “tool of retribution in response to public outrage” over attacks by the Islamic State (IS) group, Amnesty International said. This includes a mass execution carried out on 25 September, 11 days after an IS suicide attack in Nasiriyah, which killed at least 84 people.
Egypt executed 35 people last year, and with 402 people sentenced to death compared to at least 237 in 2016, it handed down the majority of death sentences in the region.
The report also expressed the group's concern that Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates all resumed executions in 2017.
On 25 January 2017, Kuwait executed seven people - the first death penalty carried out since 2013. Similarly in Bahrain, three men were killed in the first executions there since 2010. Amnesty said that the trials of Ali Abdulshaheed al-Sankis, Sami Mirza Mshaima and Abbas Jamil Taher Mhammad al-Samea failed to meet international standards.
The men were executed by firing squad, and Amnesty said their lawyers did not have access to all of the evidence against them.
Sayed Alwadaei, director of advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD), told MEE: "The extra-judicial execution of three men last year was a heinous crime, a disproportionate punishment, which relied on torture. The execution was signed by King Hamad, and the blood-stained clothes of the executed men were handed to their families, an action usually taken by members of a mafia, not a state."
He added that Bahrain had handed down 15 death sentences in 2017 alone, which was "the highest number in a single year since the modern courts were established in Bahrain in 1923".
In the Gaza Strip, authorities carried out executions of six men - three for "collaboration with Israeli authorities".
They were carried out without the Palestinian president's approval in violation of Palestinian Basic Law (constitution).
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