Saudi Arabia has agreed to allow a dual U.S. and Saudi citizen who had been banned from leaving the kingdom to return home to Florida. Saad Almadi, 75, was sentenced to 19 years in prison in 2021 after criticizing the Saudi government in 14 posts on Twitter, but the charges were later reduced to “cyber crimes” and he was sentenced to a 30-year ban on leaving the country instead.
The Saudi government’s change of heart comes just a day after the country’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, met with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington. The lenience toward Almadi appears to be a one-time event and does not represent a trend toward greater tolerance of dissent. As Nadine Farid Johnson wrote in WPR in 2022, Almadi’s case is notable because the critical tweets were posted while he was in the United States, demonstrating that Riyadh has expanded its crackdown on dissent even to countries beyond its borders. His case and others like it “make clear that Saudi Arabia is willing to surveil its citizens abroad and severely punish them for exercising their right to free expression within the jurisdiction of democratic countries,” Johson wrote. “This transnational policing is a new form of repression, using freely expressed opinions to silence and oppress.”
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