Badawi’s wife, who was granted political asylum and has been living in Sherbrooke with the couple’s three children since 2013, sent out a desperate plea over the weekend after she was informed by “reliable sources that there are attempts within the Penal Court to retry (Badawi) on apostasy charges again.”
If retried and found guilty, Badawi could face death by beheading in the Middle Eastern kingdom.
Ensaf Haidar has been fighting for her husband’s release for months. In her statement, she called on the public and government officials to step in, saying that she fears Badawi will be “dragged by such bigots to death.”
Badawi’s situation has received international attention, and Montreal mayor Denis Coderre recently called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to lobby Saudi officials to free the 31-year-old blogger, who is not a Canadian citizen.
Shortly after 11 a.m. on Monday, Haidar updated her Facebook page and revealed that she had received a call from Austrian Foreign Affairs Minister Sebastian Kurz. She did not reveal what had been said during the call. In February, the Austrian government threatened to close a controversial Saudi-sponsored religious dialogue centre in Vienna as a direct result of Badawi’s detention.
Badawi is currently serving a sentence of 10 years in prison, accompanied by 1,000 lashes to be administered in groups of 50, after being found guilty of insulting Islam via his liberal blog. He had initially also been charged with apostasy, but that accusation was dropped in 2013 after Badawi assured the judge he remained a Muslim. According to various reports, one of the pieces of evidence against him was that he had “liked” a Facebook page for Arab Christians. The judge who sentenced Badawi is the same man who is now seeking to have him retried, according to Haidar.
“This judge is biased against Raif,” she said. “He has twice requested that Raif be charged with ‘apostasy.’ His request was declined at the time on the ground that the penal court has no jurisdiction on cases that lead to death penalty. However, due to a new regulation issued by the Supreme Judicial Council on Sept. 19, 2014, the penal court has now jurisdiction over major cases, which are punishable by the death penalty, amputation and stoning.”
Calls made by The Montreal Gazette to Amnesty International’s regional branches in Montreal and Sherbrooke — which have been following the case closely — were not immediately returned on Monday.
