On August 21, 2025, Saudi Arabia announced the execution of minor Jalal Labad, following a trial that lacked the most basic standards of justice and fair trial guarantees, and was based on confessions extracted under torture.
Labad was arrested on February 23, 2017, after a raid on his home in the city of Al-Awamiyah without an arrest warrant or prior summons. From the moment of his arrest, he was subjected to horrific violations, including:
- • Solitary confinement for nearly nine and a half months.
- • Denial of access to a lawyer and his right to defense.
- • Brutal torture, including group beatings with rods and metal wires, electric shocks to various parts of his body including his genitals, suffocation by stomping on his neck, near-drowning by submerging his head in water until he lost consciousness, and targeted torture on injured areas of his body with iron rods.
- • Threats to rape his sisters and kill him to force confessions.
Labad was hospitalized multiple times due to loss of consciousness, low blood pressure, weak heartbeat, and severe swelling in his right thigh.
He was not brought before the Specialized Criminal Court until more than two years after his arrest. The charges against him included:
- • Participating in demonstrations, some of which occurred when he was only fifteen years old.
- • Attending funerals of victims killed by Saudi forces.
- • Harboring and providing medical assistance to “wanted” individuals.
In addition, he was accused of assisting the treatment of injured wanted persons, sheltering them, and participating with others in the case of Judge Mohammed Al-Jirani of the Qatif Court of Endowments and Inheritance, who was kidnapped and killed. However, the charges did not specify his actual role in that case. He was also accused of shooting at and throwing Molotov cocktails at security forces.
Since the kidnapping of Al-Jirani in December 2016, Saudi Arabia has killed nine individuals extrajudicially under the pretext of involvement in this crime. Despite the Ministry of Interior’s spokesperson not naming Jalal in two press conferences about the case, the Public Prosecution charged him with participating alongside wanted persons in the crime.
استخدام قضية الجيراني ضد لباد ليست حالة استثنائية، فقد وثقت المنظمة الأوروبية السعودية لحقوق الإنسان، بلوغ من اتهموا في هذه القضية من خلال المتحدث الأمني والنيابة العامة والصحف الرسمية إلى 22 شخصاً (قد يكون هناك متهمون آخرين)، 9 منهم قتلوا خارج إطار القانون.
UN mechanisms positions
UN mechanisms have repeatedly confirmed that Jalal Labad was a minor, and that his discretionary death sentence was arbitrary and should have been revoked:
- • In June 2024, UN Special Rapporteurs sent a communication to the Saudi government, exposing the authorities’ evasion and failure to provide substantive answers regarding minors facing execution, including Jalal.
- • On November 15, 2024, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a legal opinion confirming that Jalal’s detention was arbitrary, emphasized his status as a minor, and called for his immediate release.
- • On April 30, 2025, the Working Group issued a public statement expressing deep concern over Saudi Arabia’s continued execution of minors, including Jalal Labad.
According to ESOHR, with Jalal’s execution, the number of minors documented as executed since King Salman assumed power has reached 14, though the actual figure may be higher.
This is the first recorded execution of a minor since Mustafa Al-Darwish on June 15, 2021. It underscores the lack of credibility in Saudi Arabia’s Juvenile Law, which it claims limits discretionary death sentences for minors, as well as the royal decree issued in 2020.
ESOHR places this crime within the broader context of Saudi Arabia’s systematic violations against minors and political detainees. The execution of Jalal Labad sends a clear message of Saudi Arabia’s determination to defy its international obligations, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention against Torture, as well as its domestic laws that supposedly prohibit the execution of minors. It also demonstrates utter disregard for UN human rights mechanisms, including Special Rapporteurs’ communications and Working Groups’ statements.
The organization stresses that Labad’s execution, carried out with such brutality and without prior notice, underscores the imminent risk to the lives of more than 60 political detainees, including Jalal’s brother Mohammed Labad, and several other minors such as: Abdullah Al-Derazi, Youssef Al-Munasif, Hassan Zaki Al-Faraj, Jawad Qureiris, Mahdi Al-Mohsen, Ali Al-Sbayti, and Ali Al-Mubayouq.
ESOHR affirms that the execution of Jalal Labad, after years of torture and arbitrary detention, the killing of his brother Fadel Labad in the mass execution of April 2019, and under the looming threat to his brother Mohammed Labad’s life, reflects the true nature of a system that deploys the death penalty relentlessly and without restraint. It exposes the reality of its bloody practices, in stark contrast to official propaganda that attempts to mask repression.