Houthi authorities have sentenced a human rights defender to death based on charges of espionage and "aid[ing] the enemy," Human Rights Watch said today. They should quash the verdict and end their escalating repression of residents' free expression and women's rights.
On December 5, 2023, the Specialized Criminal Prosecution in Sanaa, which has been controlled by the Houthis along with much of northern Yemen since 2014, convicted and sentenced to death Fatima Saleh al-Arwali, a 35-year-old human rights defender and the former head of the Yemen office of the Arab League's Union of Women Leaders, on charges of collaborating with the enemy-in this case, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). She had no legal representation at the trial, and her family has only been able to contact her twice from detention since she was arrested in August 2022.
"Repression of human rights defenders and women's rights activists in Houthi-controlled territories is reaching terrifying new levels," said Niku Jafarnia, Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Instead of providing people in their territory with basic necessities such as food and water, the Houthis are suppressing human rights and freedoms."
Human Rights Watch spoke with four people with firsthand knowledge of Arwali's case and her detention conditions, including her brother, Mohammed, as well as a lawyer who tried to represent her, and reviewed court documents and other reports of her case.
The sources said that Arwali was arrested on August 12, 2022, while on her way from Aden to Sanaa, at a Houthi-controlled checkpoint entering al-Hawban district in Taizz. Her lawyer said she had just returned from visiting her mother in the UAE, where her family lives and she was born. She called her brother at the checkpoint to tell him that the Houthis had stopped her, and her family didn't hear from her again until January 2023.
A letter to the Houthi foreign minister from United Nations special rapporteurs said the Houthi Security and Intelligence Service (SIS) forcibly disappeared her and provided no access to legal counsel, and she had only been able to contact her family twice since being detained. They said that "the Houthi authorities initially denied any knowledge of her arrest or whereabouts when asked by her lawyer."
On July 31, Arwali's lawyer learned that the Houthis had charged her with "aid[ing] the enemy [the UAE]," according to the official indictment issued by the Specialized Criminal Prosecution on July 31, which Human Rights Watch reviewed. The documents state that Arwali was "recruited to work with UAE intelligence officers who are overseeing and supervising the war and aggression on Yemen," and that she "agreed to provide them with sensitive information and locations of the [Yemeni] army and popular committees." The Prosecution did not offer any public evidence to support these charges.
Arwali has previously criticized Yemeni authorities on her social media account and had also regularly posted about women's and children's rights and child recruitment in the conflict between the Houthis and the Yemeni government, which is supported by the Saudi and UAE-led coalition.
Arwali's lawyer posted on social media on September 19 that at her initial hearing that day, she agreed to have him as her legal counsel. The lawyer told the judge that he was there to represent her, which she confirmed. However, when the lawyer asked Arwali to request a copy of her case and charges, an intelligence officer ordered him to leave the courtroom. He said that as he was leaving the courtroom, he heard the judge telling Arwali that "she will not need a lawyer and [the lawyer] can do nothing for her."
One source said that since the Houthis took over Sanaa in 2014, "this happens regularly … when someone is arrested by the security and intelligence department, they bring them to the court and ask them to admit everything [and state that] otherwise they will torture them, so that he or she will confess to the charges."
