On Wednesday 21 June, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz elevated his son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to Crown Prince, demoting Mohammed bin Nayef and leaving him out of the line of royal succession. Bin Salman’s ascendance to Crown Prince marks a radical reordering of the power dynamics in the Saudi royal family[…]
2015 was a watershed year for human rights in Saudi Arabia. It began last January, with the death of a cautious king whose experiments with limited reforms ended with the Arab Spring. It draws to a close now, having witnessed a near-record setting spate of executions, worsening repression of reformers and political dissidents, and a[…]