Macron’s reception of MBS is a slap in the face for Saudi Arabia’s human rights victims

The meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is a slap in the face for Saudi human rights victims, and it signals a shameful and dangerous rehabilitation of the kingdom’s de facto ruler, a trend that world leaders must urgently challenge.

According to the Elysee Palace, Mohammed bin Salman visited Paris on Thursday, July 28, 2022, for a working dinner with President Macron. It is the crown prince’s second visit to a Western nation since the state-sponsored murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. He was in Greece on Tuesday.

Despite the worldwide calls for accountability for Khashoggi’s brutal murder and Saudi Arabia’s persistent oppression of free expression, Macron became the first Western leader to meet the crown prince. Others, notably outgoing UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in March 2022 and US President Joe Biden earlier this month, have since followed suit and resumed visits to Saudi Arabia.

Rather than achieving substantial compromises on human rights, such trips have directly emboldened the kingdom’s authorities. Johnson’s visit fell on the same day as the execution of 81 men on March 12, 2022, the greatest mass execution in modern Saudi history. During Biden’s visit, Saudi diplomat and former Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir gave a BBC interview in which he boldly labeled dissidents as “terrorists.”

As international pressure to hold Saudi elites responsible has diminished, the authorities have turned to their usual pattern of repression, which has been a characteristic of the crown prince’s leadership since 2017. This has included new waves of arbitrary arrests of nonviolent opponents, harsher sentencing of activists, and deliberate efforts to threaten the lives of political prisoners. So far in 2022, the Saudi authorities have carried out 120 executions, more than double the total for 2021.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that a number of prominent female human rights campaigners and political prisoners have been conditionally freed, they remain subject to harsh limitations, implying that they are still not free.

The news of Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to France, which follows Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia, is a tough pill for Saudi activists to swallow. Rather of standing up for victims of Saudi Arabia’s systemic abuses, Macron has chosen to grant the crown prince undeserved credibility, which risks opening the way for additional crimes. Now, more than ever, other international leaders devoted to human rights must take a firm position.