Amnesty says Saudi Arabia executed 345 people in 2024, a record high

# Amnesty says Saudi Arabia executed 345 people in 2024, a record high

Saudi Arabia executed 345 people last year, Amnesty International said in a report cited by AP, marking the highest annual total the human rights group has recorded in more than three decades. The scale of the figure has renewed scrutiny of the kingdom’s death penalty use, particularly in cases that activists describe as nonviolent drug offences.

The AP report says the number has climbed sharply and that the trend has continued into 2025, with 180 executions already recorded in the first six months of this year. If that pace persists, the kingdom could surpass last year’s total again. Amnesty and another rights group, Reprieve, say many of the people being put to death are convicted on drug-related charges, not homicide.

That point is central to the criticism. Saudi Arabia remains one of the world’s leading execution states behind only China and Iran, according to the AP report, but rights groups argue the pattern of executions in drug cases undercuts the government’s claim that the death penalty is largely limited to the most serious violent crimes. The article notes that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in 2022 that the death penalty had been limited to homicide cases, although that description now appears to sit uneasily with the current figures.

The AP report also highlights the position of foreign nationals on death row. Amnesty documented the cases of 25 foreign nationals who are either currently condemned or were recently executed for drug-related offences. The group said many did not understand the legal system or their rights and had little or no legal representation, making their access to fair trials even more fragile.

The human cost appears in one case cited by AP: Egyptian national Essam Ahmed, who vanished while working on a fishing boat in Sinai before his family later learned he had been detained in Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death for drug trafficking. His family said he had been forced to carry a package at gunpoint, and relatives described the terror of waiting each morning to hear whether an execution had been carried out.

Saudi officials did not respond to AP’s detailed questions about the executions or the use of the death penalty in nonviolent drug cases. That silence leaves the broader policy debate unresolved, even as the numbers continue to climb.

The reporting comes against a backdrop of Saudi social and economic reform, including the crown prince’s Vision 2030 drive to diversify the economy and present the kingdom as more open to foreign investment. Amnesty’s critics argue that those reforms have not altered the state’s willingness to use capital punishment aggressively.

For human rights groups, the data point is not just a statistic but evidence of a policy shift that has survived repeated scrutiny. For Saudi authorities, the article suggests, the challenge is whether they will answer the criticism or continue to let the figures speak for themselves.