From CDHR
August 2, 2007
Religious Police, No Need for Proof
By Ali Alyami
The Saudi Judicial system indirectly endorses the government’s paid voracious religious police to arrest, interrogate and in some cases kill innocent Saudi citizens and escape any responsibility for their crimes. Several members of the religious police were recently questioned in a religious court regarding their purported improprieties. However, they were neither questioned about their actions, nor were any witnesses called, and they were ultimately set free, to the horror of relatives of the victims they were accused of killing. CDHR published a special newsletter on June 22, 2007 to show the ubiquity and heavy-handedness of the tactics employed by religious police against people who commit no crimes. This Saudi government’s policy is designed to ensure its control over the population using the pretext of religious purification as a moral standard. In reality , the religious police are anything but religious, in the true sense. They are group of violent people whose job is to terrorize the population and keep them in constant fear.