By Michael Filtz

In February 2008, Christoph Wilcke sent an impassioned letter to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, requesting a pardon for Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali, a woman sentenced to beheading for supposedly practicing witchcraft. Commenting on the specious nature of the charges, Wilcke wrote that “the conviction of Fawza Falih for ‘witchcraft’ is a travesty of justice and reveals severe shortcomings in Saudi Arabia’s justice system.”

Fawza Falih’s situation is representative of the ongoing struggles Wilcke faces daily in his work as Saudi Arabia researcher at Human Rights Watch: only after four months and following the deteriorating health condition of Fawz Falih, did the Saudi Human Rights Commission pledge to “take the matter up with higher authorities.” As of August 2008, she was still facing execution.

Many abuses in Saudi Arabia, Wilcke said, can be boiled down to one fundamental issue: “The big problem in Saudi Arabia is that they don’t have written criminal laws and social customs are often elevated to legal norms.” This might sound bizarre, but Wilcke should know. After repeatedly hearing that Saudi law limited women’s rights, he and a team of other Human Rights Watch researchers spent a year trying to find out exactly where these limitations were specified.

“You hear that women aren’t allowed to drive; women can’t do this, they can’t do that,” he said. “But we looked, and we looked, and we couldn’t find where this was written down.”

It turned out that in Saudi Arabia many legal injunctions are derived from Sharia (Islamic religious) law, but not codified. This means judges can decide what crime a suspect has committed and impose sentences at their own discretion, often arbitrarily, without being accountable to any person or institution, and without any reliance on precedent.

Since 2005, Wilcke, who’s also responsible for covering Jordan, has been working to reconcile the often disparate notions of what “human rights” means in the Middle East, and what international law has to say on the subject. Saudi society is clear that it only accepts human rights deemed compatible with Islamic rights, bestowed by God. Differences to modern interpretations of international human rights law arise, for example, in freedom of expression to criticize religious symbols, freedom of religion, and gender equality. Although such differences are confined to narrow areas, international human rights norms have no traction in Saudi society when they are perceived to contrast with a traditional interpretation of Islamic law.

Wilcke believes the rights he pushes for are universal, and don’t apply only to some part of the world. The difficulty is often to make people challenge traditional interpretations of religious norms. In particular, women activists in Saudi Arabia and Jordan time and again point out that discriminatory practices against them are the result of social, not religious norms. To their audience, they send a message of practicing true Islam by abolishing discrimination. Wilcke sees governments taking small steps to bridge the gap between the varying conceptions of human rights through continued discourse at United Nations forums, but also through visits by international groups like Human Rights Watch.

Wilcke grew up in Munich, where he developed what he called “a healthy skepticism for authority.” With German society still shaped by the Second World War and the Holocaust, “Never again” was a mantra and constant reminder, but his interest in human rights was not really sparked until he went to Italy, aged 18, to attend the United World College.

“I met Israelis, I met Palestinians, I met people from over 70 different nationalities,” he said. “I was exposed to problems, cultures, issues. Our college was only a few kilometers from the Slovenian border, and, in 1992 and 1993, we went to work with Bosnian refugees in Croatia.”

This exposure led Wilcke to start working with nongovernmental organizations, then international think tanks before joining Human Rights Watch as a researcher in the Middle East and North Africa division. He said that within this region, countries have their own particular human rights problems. Where Saudi Arabia lacks standardized laws, Jordan displays a more ambiguous attitude toward human rights, Wilcke said. It relies on foreign aid (mainly from the European Union, the United States, and Saudi Arabia) promising human rights reform to foreign dignitaries. But in reality, reforms are halting, and Jordan has witnessed some backsliding on civil rights over the past two years. Meanwhile, much of Jordanian society distrusts human rights organizations, viewing them as a form of “western intervention in domestic affairs.”

The European Union funds a handful of Jordanian human rights organizations, but Wilcke said that some of these organizations appear to be in business primarily for the paycheck, conducting endless human rights trainings without effective human rights monitoring or service provision.

Wilcke sees progress, even if it’s incremental. In November 2006, for example, Human Rights Watch became the first organization of its kind to be allowed to visit Saudi Arabia. “Did we change any violation?” he asked of the landmark visit. “No. But it was the first time the Saudi authorities actually sat down at a table with an international human rights monitoring group.”

In another first, the General Intelligence Department (GID), the Jordanian intelligence agency, agreed to Human Rights Watch visiting its secretive detention center to investigate human rights abuses.

“We were the first internationals to be able to go there,” said Wilcke, who was accompanied to the prison by Joanne Mariner, counter-terrorism director at Human Rights Watch. “Of course they knew we were coming, so they may have got the bad apples out before we arrived.” The GID has a long record of torture, but Wilcke said increased openness to such visits can be an effective tool in stopping abuse.

Even so, that mission was a significant achievement for human rights in Jordan, because it was the first time an international human rights group was allowed into the GID-run prison, normally off-limits. Although Wilcke and Mariner did not find any concrete evidence of torture, they did find inhumane treatment, such as prisoners being threatened with summary deportation, life-long imprisonment and being insulted. Detainees there also had no access to legal counsel, and no means of petitioning a court to review the legality of their detention. According to Wilcke, exposing such violations has been slowly helping to close the gap between what the GID perceives as humane treatment of prisoners and what international law requires.

In visits to regular Jordanian prisons at the same time, Wilcke and Mariner found themselves in the middle of a riot in Swaqa prison on August 26, 2007. Acts of collective torture by a new prison director four days earlier had gone un-investigated, so prisoners used the visit to draw attention to the issues.

“Prisoners injured themselves in front of us with makeshift knives and broken ceramic tiles,” Wilcke said. “The prison corridors turned into streams of blood. While we were leaving the facility to speak to the director, we saw 40 special forces soldiers ready to move in. They were wearing face masks and swinging truncheons, taking up positions in the courtyard.”

Wilcke and his colleagues began making urgent phone calls to the Ministry of Interior, preventing even more bloodshed. Wounded prisoners were treated, the rest returned to their cells, and the new director was suspended the following day.

Other progress is also tangible. “We’ve gotten three people released,” Wilcke said, describing his efforts to address arbitrary arrests by the GID. One of these was Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, detained for over three years at the GID prison without charge. Wilcke, working with colleagues from Jordanian and international groups, helped pressure the Jordanian government to release him in March 2008.

And Wilcke hopes that by keeping the pressure up on the authorities in Saudi Arabia, Fawza Falih will also join the list of those who have been freed.

Christoph Wilcke focuses on Jordan and Saudi Arabia