Raif Badawi built an online forum for Saudi liberals to argue about religion and reform. It cost him a decade in prison, a public flogging that stopped only when doctors said his body could not survive another round, and a family he still cannot join.
The first fifty lashes were delivered outside a mosque in Jeddah on a Friday in January 2015, in front of a crowd, to a man who could barely stand afterward. It was meant to be the opening installment of one thousand, administered fifty at a time over twenty consecutive Fridays. It was also, as it turned out, the last installment anyone outside a Saudi prison would ever see carried out. Prison doctors, examining Raif Badawi in the weeks that followed, found a body already compromised by hypertension and diabetes and wounds that had not healed, and postponed the remaining lashings on medical grounds more than a dozen times. They were never resumed. He spent the rest of his sentence, more than seven additional years, simply serving out the prison term instead.
Badawi's offense, as far as a Saudi court was concerned, was founding a website. In 2006, at the age of twenty two, he launched what he called Free Saudi Liberals, an online forum where Saudis could debate secularism, religious reform, and the role of the kingdom's clerical establishment in public life. He was arrested on June 17, 2012, on a charge of insulting Islam through electronic channels, with prosecutors at various points also pursuing a charge of apostasy, a crime that in Saudi Arabia can carry the death penalty. A court declined to pursue the apostasy charge in January 2013, but the threat resurfaced more than once in the years that followed.
A district court in Jeddah handed down Badawi's first sentence on July 30, 2013: seven years in prison and six hundred lashes, for founding what the ruling called an internet forum that violated Islamic values. He appealed. The outcome of the appeal was not leniency but escalation. On May 7, 2014, a retrial increased his punishment to ten years in prison, one thousand lashes, and a fine of one million Saudi riyals, on the broader charge of insulting Islam.
Amnesty International, which had already designated Badawi a prisoner of conscience, called the first round of flogging in January 2015 "a vicious act of cruelty." When the subsequent sessions were postponed on medical grounds rather than canceled outright, the organization said the delay itself "exposes shocking brutality of punishment," since it left Badawi indefinitely suspended between a completed sentence and one that could, in principle, resume at any time. In a letter smuggled out of prison and later published, Badawi described having, in his own words, miraculously survived the first fifty lashes.
Badawi's wife, Ensaf Haidar, left Saudi Arabia with their three children and was granted political asylum in Canada in 2013, eventually settling in Quebec, which had extended the family an immigration certificate even as Ottawa's formal diplomatic efforts to free Badawi went nowhere for years. Haidar became her husband's most visible advocate abroad, accepting the European Parliament's 2015 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought on his behalf that October, since Badawi himself could not leave Saudi Arabia to collect it. The prize citation honored him, in the Parliament's words, "for the defence of freedom of thought and human rights."
The case became, for a period, an active irritant in Saudi Arabia's relations with Ottawa. In August 2018, after the Canadian government publicly criticized the detention of Badawi's sister in law, Samar Badawi, and renewed calls for Raif Badawi's release, Saudi Arabia expelled Canada's ambassador and froze new trade and investment activity between the two countries. The following year, then-Vice President Mike Pence publicly called on Saudi Arabia to free him. None of it moved the sentence's end date.
He served every day of a ten year sentence for a website. When it ended, the court did not let him go home. It told him, instead, exactly how far from home he was allowed to travel: nowhere, for ten more years.
Badawi walked out of prison on March 11, 2022, having served the full decade. He was not permitted to leave the country. The same sentence that fixed his prison term also imposed a ten year travel ban, meaning that as of this writing he remains inside Saudi Arabia, unable to join his wife and children in Quebec without a royal pardon that has not been granted. He has, in effect, traded one form of confinement for another: a man free to walk through Jeddah but not to board a plane out of it, waiting out a second decade attached to the first.
The case has become one of the more studied examples of what Saudi Arabia's cybercrime and blasphemy statutes can do to a person who never advocated violence, never organized a political movement, and never did anything more provocative than build a website where people could argue about ideas. Free Saudi Liberals is long gone. Badawi's name, and the image of him standing before a crowd waiting to be struck, is not.
Badawi's case predates his 2012 arrest by several years. Saudi authorities had already imposed a travel ban against him in December 2009, after he criticized the country's religious police in print, a warning sign that went unheeded, or perhaps simply proved beside the point once the website itself became the target. Over the course of his imprisonment he accumulated an unusually long list of honors he could not travel to accept in person: the Deschner Prize, awarded jointly with his wife in 2016, France's Prix de la Laïcité in 2018, the Los Angeles Press Club's Daniel Pearl Award the same year, and a nomination among two hundred seventy six candidates considered for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. English PEN organized recurring vigils on his behalf beginning in February of that year. None of it altered the calendar of his sentence, which simply had to be served, day by day, exactly as written.