Tens of thousands suffer in Saudi detention centres despite promise of reform
Exclusive: Four years after a Telegraph investigation uncovered widespread abuses, new footage suggests nothing has changed
Tens of thousands of people are being subjected to degrading conditions inside Saudi detention centres despite the Kingdom’s promise to reform the way it treats migrant workers.
Four years ago, a Telegraph Global Health Security investigation uncovered the first evidence of widespread abuses inside the facilities, prompting international outcry and a pledge from Riyadh to take action.
But a tranche of new footage smuggled out of the centres housing those awaiting deportation suggests nothing has changed.
The footage is part of a new documentary which will be broadcast on ITV on Sunday and reveals what life is really like inside the Kingdom under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
It includes videos showing hundreds of people forced to sleep on the floor of a single room, with bin bags for blankets.
In another clip, overflowing toilets and dirt-covered floors are a clear sign of the unsanitary and overcrowded conditions detainees have to live in.
“It’s filthy here, there aren’t enough toilets,” says Zaro Gebre, an Ethiopian detainee who smuggled footage out of a detention centre in Jizan in Saudi Arabia’s south west, near the border with Yemen.
“We are all in this one room called Amber,” he says in a video sent in March of this year, filmed from beneath a piece of plastic sheet to hide from security cameras. “There are 600 of us – we wear plastic sheets and we sleep in black plastic bags.”
“The detainees who are aged between 15 and 20 are suffering the most psychological trauma,” he says.
Video captured inside a women’s detention centre in the capital, Riyadh, shows security personnel struggling to intervene as a mentally-ill detainee attacks a fellow prisoner. Later footage appears to show the victim’s lifeless body lying on the tiled floor.
Saudi Arabia has long relied on an underclass of foreign workers from Africa and Asia, who make up around a fifth of the country’s population.
Many of those in the Kingdom’s detention centres have fallen foul of its strict immigration rules, particularly since the Crown Prince introduced a policy requiring private companies to hire a percentage of Saudi nationals.
Some eight million people have been arrested in a crackdown on illegal immigration and migration offences since Mohamed bin Salman assumed de facto control of the Kingdom in 2017.
Ethiopians like Mr Gebre, who have fled war and poverty in their home country for the chance of a better life in the Gulf, make up a large proportion of those in the Saudi detention centres.
Mr Gebre estimated that there were between forty and fifty thousand people in the Jizan detention centre alone.
In the end, Mr Gebre endured nine months in Jizan before he was eventually released and deported back to Ethiopia.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that place was hell on earth,” he says. “They never let us outside during my nine-month stay. They never let anyone experience fresh air or sunlight.
“I witnessed sick people attempting suicide, their friends had to tie them down – I met people who were driven completely crazy” he says, echoing testimony detainees gave to the Telegraph during the newspaper’s original investigation.
In a further echo of the conditions described in 2020, Mr Gebre described being beaten with a length of black electrical cable.
“They hit me again and again and again – I will never forget my last beating.”
The Saudi embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Telegraph.
The new evidence of Saudi rights abuses comes with the Kingdom in the middle of a public relations blitz – including a massive move into sports like football, golf and boxing – that is widely seen as a way to bolster its international reputation.
Saudi Arabia is the only bidder for the 2034 FIFA World Cup and is expected to be formally confirmed as the host later this year.
But the country’s move into football is under heightened scrutiny.
Leaked WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph suggested that the both Crown Prince and British ministers were closely involved in the state sovereign wealth fund’s takeover of Newcastle United, despite denials of government interference in the deal from Boris Johnson and Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive.
The Kingdom is spending billions to transform its global image and become a tourism and entertainment hub under the Crown Prince’s Vision 2030 plan to diversify the economy away from oil.
But its campaign was dealt a blow earlier this month when it failed in a bid to win a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council, four years after its 2020 bid was rejected.
In the wake of the Telegraph’s investigation in 2020, the Saudi government told the newspaper that the images showing abuses inside the detention centres were “shocking and unacceptable to us as a country”.
“If facilities are found to be lacking their needs will be addressed appropriately,” it said in a statement sent via its embassy in London.
Four years later, and rights campaigners have seen no evidence that anything has been done to improve conditions for detainees.
“The only response that I’ve seen, in practice, is to ban phones, which would seem to be an attempt to cauterise any more evidence of these horrifying abuses from getting out,” said Nadia Hardman, a Refugee and Migrant Rights Researcher at Human Rights Watch. “If anything, it’s just getting worse.”
“I went from documenting horrifying abuses in detention to deaths on the border,” she told The Telegraph, referring to a report alleging that Saudi border guards had fired rocket-propelled grenades at migrants crossing from Yemen.
Much of the material that forms the new documentary, ‘Kingdom Uncovered’, was gathered undercover and at great personal risk.
Those behind the film say they were motivated to reveal the jarring contrast between the Saudi Arabia of the PR campaign and the reality of life in the country.
“It was coming across that Telegraph investigation that really shocked me and made me think there’s such a big difference between what we’re seeing in terms of the publicity around Vision 2030 and the reforms in Saudi Arabia, and the potential for very serious abuses taking place inside the country at the same time,” said Sam Collins, the director.
“It’s almost impossible, I think, to hold those two ideas together in your head at the same time,” he said. “On the one hand, it could be this amazing, forward-thinking, reforming country. But then to see that footage, it flagged up to me how large that discrepancy was.
“We’d heard the allegations about human rights abuses inside the country, but actual footage relating to those abuses is extremely rare, so we were determined to find a way to get in and investigate.”
The filmmakers also challenged the British government, which, in 2014, signed an agreement to help modernise the Saudi Ministry of the Interior that runs the detention centres.
The government refused to give up any information about the programme, saying that it could damage relations between Britain and the Kingdom.
Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia, Sunday 27th October, 22:15pm on ITV
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