By Mark Caplin
The World Evangelical Alliance has said the US government must do more to hold Saudi Arabia to account on religious liberty.
Saudi Arabia has been on the US State Department’s Country of Particular Concern (CPC) list since 2004. Countries on the list can be subject to economic sanctions but the WEA states in a new report that these have been waived in the case of Saudi Arabia since 2006.
The WEA suggests the US is having little impact in improving religious rights in the Wahhabi Sunni kingdom and points to the recent sentencing of cyber activist Raef Badawi to seven years in prison and 600 lashes for offending Islam and violating the kingdom’s cyber crime law.
Similar sentences this year include that handed to a Christian Lebanese man accused of helping a Saudi women convert to Christianity. The Saudi Gazette reported that he was sentenced to six years in prison and 300 lashes, and the daughter sentenced to six years and 300 lashes, although she reportedly fled to Sweden.
The World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission reported in February this year that 53 Ethiopian Christians, 46 of whom were women, had been arrested by Saudi authorities. They were rounded up while attending a worship service in the home of an Ethiopian believer in Dammam and charged with trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.
Read more at http://au.christiantoday.com/article/us-should-condemn-saudi-arabia-religious-abuses/15980.htm