Saudi Crown Prince on Trial in the US for Khashoggi Murder?

Kingdom of Silence (2020)

The Dissident (2021)

Washington DC – This week, we witnessed new challenges to the world’s justice system. Two occasions showed us the vulnerability of the current system, both of them put light on fictitious impartiality of the United States.

Firstly, a US judge has requested the Biden administration's opinion on whether Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should be granted sovereign immunity in a civil complaint brought against him in the US by Hatice Cengiz, the fiancée of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who was murdered by Saudi agents in 2018.

When Saudi agents abducted, bound, drugged, tortured, and eventually killed Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, they allegedly did so in a "conspiracy and with premeditation," according to the civil complaint against Prince Mohammed that Cengiz filed in the federal district court of Washington DC in October 2020. When he was assassinated, Khashoggi — a former insider in Saudi Arabia who had left the country and was now a resident of Virginia — was an outspoken opponent of the young crown prince and actively working to fight Saudi internet propaganda.

It was "laughable," according to Agnès Callamard, the head of Amnesty International, that Prince Mohammed, whom she referred to as "an almost-sovereign," could enjoy head of state immunity after the US itself had concluded in the open that he authorized the operation to kill Khashoggi.