Ethiopians on Saudi Death Row Are Calling the BBC to Tell Their Stories
Dozens await execution in a kingdom that rarely explains itself — and few outside channels are listening
By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
They are calling from inside Saudi prisons, on phones smuggled past guards, to tell a foreign broadcaster what their own governments have not been able to say for them. According to the BBC, dozens of Ethiopian nationals are on death row in Saudi Arabia, and some have reached out directly to the network describing their fear of execution and, in several cases, disputing the fairness of the process that put them there.
Saudi Arabia executes more people than nearly any country besides China and Iran, and it does so with little public accounting — no routine release of case files, no consistent access for foreign observers, and limited legal representation for migrant workers who make up a large share of the kingdom's death row population. Ethiopians are among the largest groups of foreign laborers in Saudi Arabia, working construction and domestic jobs that formal channels rarely protect.
What exactly these individual men and women are accused of, and whether their trials met basic standards, is difficult for outsiders to verify — the BBC's reporting is drawn substantially from the accounts of the prisoners themselves, a limitation worth stating plainly. But the pattern the calls describe — foreign workers, far from consular help, facing capital charges in a system opaque even to seasoned diplomats — tracks with what rights groups have documented for years across the Gulf's labor-migration economy.
A phone call from a cell is not proof. It is, at minimum, a cry for someone to check. That, too, is a form of accountability — the kind that starts when someone finally picks up.
Nothing happens "over there" anymore.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
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