Introduction
The European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESOHR) has documented the reality of women’s executions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the period 2015–2025. This decade coincided with the rise of official rhetoric around “modernisation” and “women’s empowerment” under Vision 2030, alongside a widening gap between reform discourse and the actual practice of criminal justice. Despite claims of “progress,” the data show that women—both Saudi nationals and migrant domestic workers—faced the death penalty in contexts marked by a lack of transparency, weak fair-trial guarantees, and recurring patterns of violations at every stage, from detention and investigation to trial and execution.
The research is based on systematic monitoring conducted by ESOHR of execution announcements issued by the Ministry of Interior and published through the Saudi Press Agency (SPA). It identifies at least 44 executions of women during the reporting period. The report stresses that these figures represent a conservative minimum, given severe restrictions on access to information, the absence of official public lists of women on death row, and the difficulty of secure communication with families. The report also highlights cases carried out without official announcement, raising serious concerns about opacity and discrimination, particularly in cases involving foreign women.
The findings demonstrate a clear pattern affecting non-Saudi women, with migrant domestic workers constituting the majority of cases. These women operate within a closed labour environment characterised by unequal power relations, near-total dependency under the kafala sponsorship system, and weak protection mechanisms. Of 42 documented cases analysed in detail, 29 involved foreign nationals and 13 involved Saudi women. In terms of charges, executions were primarily linked to murder (approximately 79%). However, recent years have seen a notable increase in executions for drug-related offences, with all women executed in drug cases being foreign nationals. The report also analyses sentencing classifications—hadd, qisas, and taʿzir—and highlights how structural inequalities, particularly affecting migrant women, render avenues such as diya (blood money) and pardon practically unattainable due to poverty, lack of support, and cross-border constraints.
Through the examination of individual cases, the report documents recurring violations, including denial of legal representation and interpretation, reliance on confessions of questionable validity that may have been obtained under coercion, prolonged isolation and ill-treatment, lack of timely consular notification, restricted family contact, and executions carried out without prior notice to families or concerned states. These violations appear across different types of cases, demonstrating that the problem is not exceptional but systemic and entrenched.
The research further highlights the weak diplomatic response of many labour-sending countries, where reactions are often limited to post-execution statements despite the availability of preventive diplomatic pressure tools. The report situates these shortcomings within Saudi Arabia’s international obligations, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and the Arab Charter on Human Rights, as well as relevant standards such as the Bangkok Rules and the Nelson Mandela Rules. It also draws on the concerns and recommendations of the CEDAW Committee (October 2024) regarding transparency, the integration of gender-related mitigating factors, the right to defence and interpretation, and detention conditions for women on death row.
The report concludes that women’s executions in Saudi Arabia are not isolated incidents, but the direct outcome of a legal and security structure that allows violations to accumulate in the shadows—particularly against migrant domestic workers—and normalises the irreversible deprivation of life without meaningful oversight or accountability. It calls for urgent measures, including an immediate halt to executions, the strengthening of fair-trial guarantees, the effective activation of consular protection mechanisms, and structural reforms addressing the vulnerability of migrant domestic workers within both the labour system and the criminal justice framework.
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