The wife of the jailed blogger Raif Badawi has called on Saudi Arabia’s powerful royal family to grant him an “amnesty”, allowing him to leave the country and rejoin his young family in Canada.
In an emotional appeal published by The Independent exactly a year after her husband was sentenced to a decade in prison and 1,000 lashes by Jeddah’s Criminal Court, Ensaf Haidar said he had been locked up merely because he was “a man of thought who conveyed that thought in writing”.
Writing in her native Arabic, she accused Saudi Arabia of treating her husband “like a criminal deserving of punishment, floggings and imprisonment” simply because he had spoken his mind through his liberal blog and wanted his country to respect people’s differences.
However, she said their efforts to silence him had failed. “Voicing his thoughts loudly annoyed the Saudi authorities but they have made him into an icon of freedom – not only in Saudi Arabia, but throughout the world,” she wrote.
Ms Haidar, who now lives in Quebec after being forced to flee Saudi Arabia with the couple’s three children, said that despite being separated from her husband she was “standing strong and filled with happiness” because she knew the world recognised his bravery.
To mark the anniversary of his sentencing on 7 May, thousands of Mr Badawi’s supporters are planning to converge on Saudi Arabian embassy buildings across the world, staging protests and demanding his release.
His wife concluded her letter with a direct appeal to the conservative kingdom’s rulers. “I appeal to the respected Saudi Crown Prince and his successor to grant Raif amnesty and allow him to leave Saudi Arabia for Canada, where we, his family, live,” she wrote.
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