Cabinet Committees
Dail Éireann — 2021-04-28
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

In five days, Abdulrahman al-Sahdan, who is a Red Crescent humanitarian worker from Saudi Arabia, will be sentenced by the Saudi regime to 20 years imprisonment for a tweet. Him and about 70 other democracy activists are facing sentences of between ten and 30 years each. They are persecuted by the Saudi regime, which, let us remember, carved Jamal Khashoggi into pieces in the Saudi embassy in Turkey, almost certainly at the behest of Crown Prince bin Salman. This young man will get 20 years in prison for a tweet even though he is a totally peaceful activist. Even Nancy Pelosi has called on the Saudi regime to release Abdulrahman. I ask that five days before this sentence, if the Taoiseach believes in anything like the right to peaceful and democratic protest and the right to dissent, he would call out the Saudi regime and ask for Abdulrahman's release.
This is shocking stuff compared with what some people have to put up with, and I would not make the sort of loose comparison that Deputy Mattie McGrath made earlier on. However, I find it worrying that under the guise of public health restrictions we are seeing political policing by Drew Harris of a protest planned tomorrow by taxi drivers that would have been fully compliant with public health guidelines. The Taoiseach should call that out too.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2021-04-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:13+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-04-28