“It is appalling that Phillip Hammond refused to condemn the mass beheadings that took place in Saudi on January 2," David Mepham, Britain director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told Huffington Post UK. “The Foreign Secretary chose not to criticise Saudi executions but rather to contextualise, explain and seemingly excuse them.”
International pressure groups Reprieve and Amnesty International joined HRW in condemning the British top diplomat's statement.
The human right groups' condemnation comes as it was revealed Saudi Arabia was conspicuously missing from Britain’s five-year strategy on how to abolish capital punishment worldwide, despite ranking third among countries in terms of the number of executions.
Nimr al-Nimr had demanded more rights for Shiites, who are a minority in Saudi Arabia where most citizens are Sunni Muslims. In 2014, he was sentenced by Saudi authorities to death on charges of inciting hatred, disobedience to the king and the establishment of a terrorist cell with the aim to attack law enforcement personnel.