The British government's determination to continue selling weapons to Saudi Arabia – despite credible reports that the Saudis are committing war crimes in Yemen – is facing its most serious challenge yet. A parliamentary committee – the Committee on Arms Export Controls (CAEC) – is due to...
Blog archive: Saudi Arabia
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7th September 2016
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4th September 2016The wealthy autocrats of the Gulf have traditionally relied on money to minimise dissent and keep themselves in power. In the initial alarm over the Arab Spring uprisings, the king of Saudi Arabia dipped into his pockets and produced a £133 billion social spending package to include bonuses...
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3rd September 2016Global soccer and global sports governance have for the past nine years and certainly since a fateful meeting in late 2010 of the executive committee of FIFA, the world soccer body, witnessed crisis after crisis. Invariably the scandals involved corruption: financial corruption, political...
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2nd September 2016Britain's three worst newspapers – the Daily Express, the Sun and the Daily Mail – along with the dreadful Jihadwatch website and the Russian Sputnik propaganda site have suddenly become excited about the plight of atheists in Saudi Arabia. During the last few days they have all reported that...
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24th August 2016The British government faces growing calls to review its lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Yesterday the international charity Oxfam accused Britain of being “one of the most significant violators” of the Arms Trade Treaty. The UK’s arms sales are, at least in theory,...
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21st August 2016In a TV interview today, Yemen's ex-president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, appeared to invite Russian military intervention in the country's conflict. He talked of reactivating old Yemeni agreements with the Soviet Union and offfered "all the facilities" of Yemen's bases, ports and airports to Russia...
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8th August 2016Saudi Arabia's second-largest construction firm is likely to declare itself bankrupt, the Saudi Gazette reported today. For several months now, Saudi Oger, the debt-ridden company headed by Lebanese politician Saad Hariri, has failed to pay tens of thousands of its workers – many of them expatriate...
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2nd August 2016Thousands of Indian workers are trapped in Saudi Arabia, unable to leave the country and with no means to support themselves after their employer stopped paying them. At the weekend Indian embassy officials began organising emergency food aid following reports that several hundred workers had...
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28th July 2016For several weeks now there has been growing evidence that Twitter is being used for a covert and highly organised propaganda operation which disparages Shia Muslims while supporting the Sunni Muslim governments of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The tactic is to deluge Twitter with multiple copies of...
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23rd July 2016During the 16 months that Saudi Arabia has been waging war in Yemen there has been little discussion of the kingdom's media strategy, though in some ways it is almost as important as the military strategy. In the article below, Sebastian Sons and Toby Matthiesen argue that the kingdom is...
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17th July 2016A verse from the Qur'an says: “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because God has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means.” In Saudi Arabia this forms the basis for a system where all women must be...
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16th May 2016Today Queen Elizabeth will deliver her annual speech to the British parliament setting out the government's programme for the next 12 months. High on the list of proposals is a renewed effort to combat "extremism", and one idea is to establish a register of "extremists" – similar to the...