The return of Mohammed Ben Salman on the international scene, as evidenced by his arrival, Thursday, July 28 in Paris, for a working dinner with Emmanuel Macron, does not mean that his worries, linked to the Khashoggi affair, are over. Proof of this is the complaint that was filed against him, Thursday morning, before the dean of the investigating judges of the Paris court, for complicity in torture and enforced disappearance.
The initiative comes from two foreign NGOs, which have joined as civil parties: Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), an American human rights organization, whose idea Jamal Khashoggi had, shortly before his assassination; and Trial International, a Swiss organization that fights impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes. The Open Society Justice Initiative Foundation, committed to the defense of international law, joined the approach of the two NGOs.
Journalist in exile in the United States, who chronicled in the pages of washington post the autocratic drift of Mohammed Bin Salman (“MBS”), Jamal Khashoggi died of suffocation by Saudi thugs, inside the kingdom’s consulate, in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2, 2018. His body, dismembered with a saw to bone, was never found. In a declassified report in February 2021, shortly after the arrival in power of the American president, Joe Biden, the American intelligence had estimated that such an operation could not have been carried out without the approval of the crown prince, who has the high hands over the kingdom’s security services.
No diplomatic immunity
The complaint was filed under universal jurisdiction, that is to say the ability of the French judicial system to judge crimes committed outside the national soil by foreign nationals, as long as the suspect is on French territory. , which seemed to be the case of Mohammed Bin Salman, Thursday morning.
The NGOs behind this initiative maintain that the crown prince, son of King Salman, does not benefit from diplomatic immunity, reserved, according to them, only to heads of state. “As a party to the Convention against Torture and the Convention against Enforced Disappearances, France is obliged to investigate a suspect like Ben Salman if he is on French territory”says Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director of DAWN.
The authors of the complaint also call for the intervention of the French judicial authorities, arguing that Turkey recently dropped the charges against the members of the Istanbul commando and that their trial, organized in Riyadh in 2019, “was a masquerade”. At the end of this procedure, eight agents of the Saudi intelligence services, simple executants of the operation, were sentenced to sentences varying between seven and twenty years in prison.
You have 29.11% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.