Religious Counseling

Religious and psychological counseling can be useful components in a program for rehabilitating convicted criminals. However, the persons who undergo the religious counseling program that Saudi authorities offer to suspected militants in mabahith detention have not only not been convicted, but also have never been charged with a crime. The problem with the program, from a human rights perspective, is that except as part of a sentence imposed after conviction for a crime, international human rights law does not permit the detention of persons to undergo a reeducation program. Such involuntary detentions are always arbitrary. Education programs, while they may form part of a post-conviction regime, cannot be forced upon persons whose guilt has not been established.[5]

Starting in 2003, the Saudi Ministry of Interior set up pilot schemes of what are now called Consultation Committees. The purpose of the work of the Consultation Committees is to facilitate the reintegration of persons who harbor thoughts of violence or who have committed such acts, their staff told Human Rights Watch in December 2006.[6] There are two different types of rehabilitation programs through counseling: one extended version at a special rehabilitation center, reserved for former detainees at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and around one hundred and fifty select other mabahith detainees, and the other, reduced version for thousands of other mabahith detainees inside mabahith prisons.

The committees working in the reduced program consist of religious shaikhs, or clerics (not necessarily government employees), and psychologists, who visit and initiate discussions with detainees. In 2006 there were two types of counseling in the reduced program: in one, the committee staff would hold two individual sessions with the detainee before assessing him. In the other, the detainee would participate in a six-week classroom program with other detainees before sitting for a written examination. Topics include the elements of basic psychology, proper understanding of jihad, protection of non-Muslims in Islam, and allegiance to the ruler. The committees’ most important message, Human Rights Watch heard from committee members as well as former detainees, is the impermissibility of fighting in the name of jihad unless approved by a ruler and the potential jihadi’s parents.[7]

The committees’ head, Abd al-Rahman al-Hadlaq, insisted to Human Rights Watch in December 2006 that participation is voluntary. He noted that graduation from the program and a positive recommendation does not invariably lead to release, but many ask to participate, he said, “because they know that they won’t be released without completing the program.”[8] The absence of any legal process for mabahith detainees until the selection of some for trial in 2008 after years of indefinite detention (see below) meant that, in practice, passing the Consultation Committees’ assessment offered the only chance for release from prison, though it provided no guarantee. Many detainees who reportedly received commendations from their instructors remain imprisoned.[9]

By December 2006 the authorities had released more than 700 persons out of over 2,000 detainees who had undergone the program since its inception in mid-2004.[10] Saudi Interior Ministry officials said that by December 2007, 1,700 detainees remained in the program while 1,500 had been released, Bloomberg.com reported on December 12, 2007.[11]

Guantanamo detainees

In addition to the Consultation Committees’ work in mabahith prisons around the country, the Saudi government around 2006 opened the Prince Muhammad bin Nayef Rehabilitation Center north of Riyadh, initially to host Saudis formerly detained at Guantanamo whom the United States had transferred into Saudi custody.

The US has sent home the vast majority of the nearly 140 Saudis who were originally held at Guantanamo. When former Guantanamo detainees are returned to Saudi Arabia, security officials typically debrief them before holding them at the rehabilitation center for a period of several weeks or months, or, in more recent cases, even longer periods (see below).[12] Detainees at the rehabilitation center receive religious and psychological counseling (they can also engage in games and sports), and the government helps to find them work—and often a wife, too, by footing the dowry—and obtains security guarantees from the detainees’ family and tribe. Upon releasing the detainees, the government bans them from foreign travel and keeps them under observation.

In addition to counseling, some ex-Guantanamo detainees received what Saudi officials have called trials, involving a short appearance before a judge who released them after sentencing them for time already served following their transfer, typically for “leaving the country without permission,” some of the former Guantanamo detainees told Human Rights Watch.[13]

In April 2009 Agence France Press reported based on Ministry of Interior sources that 270 detainees, 117 of whom were Guantanamo returnees, had undergone this extended version of the rehabilitation program.[14] Saudi officials have claimed a high success rate for their program of religious and psychological rehabilitation for ex-Guantanamo detainees. These claims received a setback when it emerged that two graduates of the program had gone to Yemen to unify the Yemen and Saudi branches of al Qaeda.[15] The Saudi government reported in January 2009 that 11 former Guantanamo detainees who went through the rehabilitation program had escaped Saudi monitoring, but at least five were quickly re-arrested.[16] Saudi authorities alleged that they were either trying to leave the country or were associating with persons they were barred from seeing as a condition of their release from the rehabilitation program, or because officials decided they posed a risk.[17] Since then, Muhammad al-‘Awfi, one of the two who went to Yemen, surrendered and was returned to Saudi Arabia, but the other, Sa’id al-Shihri, remains at large. Saudi officials are now reassessing the program.

Approximately twelve Guantanamo detainees whom the US transferred into Saudi custody in December 2007 remain in detention at the rehabilitation center while that reassessment takes place, and have been joined there by three Guantanamo detainees transferred in June 2009.[18] The fact that some ex-Guantanamo detainees have therefore spent more than 18 months in this form of detention at this writing underscores the ability of Saudi authorities to indefinitely detain ex-Guantanamo detainees without judicial oversight.

The Obama administration is pursuing talks with the Saudi and Yemeni governments over the possible transfer of Yemeni Guantanamo detainees, the largest remaining national contingent there with nearly 100 detainees, into Saudi custody and its rehabilitation program over concerns about a resurgence of militant groups in Yemen and the government’s uneven record in law enforcement and detention practices.[19]

Foreign officials and the international media have tended to gloss over two important aspects of the Saudi religious counseling program. First, the Saudi Ministry of Interior organized visits only to the rehabilitation center with the extended program, where 270 mabahith detaineesand ex-Guantanamo detainees participated. They did not allow access to the thousands of other mabahith prisoners around the country undergoing the reduced program. Second, foreign officials and the media have often fallen into the trap of extolling the virtues of counseling while overlooking the lack of any legal process afforded detainees. For example, the UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband wrote in his blog on April 23, 2008, that he had visited a would-be Saudi suicide bomber returned from Iraq to “the Saudi Government’s rehabilitation centre - a half way house for extremists charged with terrorist offences.”[20] At a Saudi-US conference in April 2009 the incoming principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Joseph McMillan, called the Saudi rehabilitation program “extraordinarily successful.”[21]

The rehabilitation program may deserve credit for its intentions, innovations, and apparently low rate of acts of violence pursued by those released. However, the men enrolled in this program are all individuals whom the mabahith is detaining without formal charges and without any recourse to challenge their detention. Human Rights Watch has been in touch with families of persons detained for five years and longer who speak of their anguish at the long and open-ended detention, often despite their relatives’ having reportedly received a positive recommendation from the consultation program offered to detainees in mabahith prisons. Many families insist on their relatives’ innocence.