Thursday, January 28, 2021

Canada’s lawmakers grant citizenship to Saudi blogger Badawi

A human rights defender, Badawi is in jail in Saudi Arabia for blogging about free speech and ‘insulting Islam’.

Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in jail for blogging about free speech and 'insulting Islam' [File: Facundo Arrizabalaga/DPA]

28 Jan 2021


Members of Canada’s House of Commons decided to grant citizenship to Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who has been imprisoned in his home country for nine years and whose wife and three children live in Canada.

The motion, which was unanimously voted on Wednesday, asks Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino to use his “discretionary power” to grant Canadian citizenship to Badawi, “in order to remedy a particular situation and unusual distress”.

Badawi was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes and then resentenced to 10 years and 1,000 lashes in 2014 for blogging about free speech and “insulting Islam”.

He received 50 of those beatings in January 2015, but the rest of the sessions, which were to be carried out weekly, were suspended after a global outcry.

Before Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court abolished in late April flogging as a form of physical punishment, Badawi had been the most high-profile instance of flogging in the kingdom.

The blogger was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov human rights prize the following year. He is currently serving his jail term.


Ensaf Haidar, the wife of the jailed Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi, shows a portrait of her husband as he is awarded the Sakharov Prize, in Strasbourg, France [File: Christian Lutz/AP Photo]

“Now that this is a formal request from the House, [Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau and Minister Marco Mendicino must act,” Yves-Francois Blanchet, head of the separatist Bloc Quebecois party and sponsor of the bill, said after the vote.

“Every day counts” for Badawi, “as his health is constantly in danger in prison”, Blanchet said in a statement.


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