On January 4 2018, Salman Al Saud, the cousin of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was asked to report to the Saudi royal palace. After arriving at the palace at around 4 am, Salman Al Saud was then beaten before being abducted by a group of 20 guards, in the presence of Saud Al Qahtani, the crown prince’s close adviser, who had ordered the beating.

The next day, around 50 police officers raided the house of Al Saud’s father, Abdulaziz Al Saud, and arrested him.

After spending two weeks in the Ritz Carlton hotel’s hospital, due to his injuries from the beating, Salman Al Saud was then transferred to Al Ha’ir prison in Riyadh. His father was immediately transferred there after his arrest on January 5, 2018.

They were both detained incommunicado during the first seven months of their detention, after which they were able to contact their family for the first time. Despite their family’s attempts to locate them, the authorities never acknowledged that they were held in Al Ha’ir, where both Salman and Abdulaziz were placed in solitary confinement.

In mid-January 2019, after spending over 12 months in Al Ha’ir prison, Salman Al Saud and his father were transferred to a villa in Riyadh, where they were placed under house arrest under high security surveillance.

On March 27, 2020, Salman Al Saud was taken from the villa and transferred to an unknown location for two months, after which he was returned back to the same villa. It is still unknown where Salman was taken and for what reasons.

At the time of their respective arrests, neither Salman, nor his father, were presented with arrest warrants or given reasons for their arrests. Although two and a half years have elapsed since their arrests, no charges have been brought against them. They were additionally never interrogated by a law enforcement authority about any criminal offense. To date, both remain held under house arrest.

The former Chair of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights sent a letter to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia expressing concern over the conditions surrounding the detention of Salman Al Saud and asking for his release.

On August 25, 2020, MENA Rights Group and ALQST for Human Rights submitted a request for opinion to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

On December 2, 2020, following the disappearance of Salman Al Saud and his father on November 28, MENA Rights Group and ALQST for Human Rights requested the urgent intervention of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

Starting in October 2021, Salman and Abdulaziz Al Saud were allowed to contact their families and to receive family visits at their place of detention, a private villa in Riyadh. They remain detained without charges and have yet to be brought before a judicial authority.

On November 16, 2021, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary detention adopted Opinion 59/2021, finding that Salman and Abdulaziz are being detained arbitrarily and calling for their immediate release. Among the points raised, the UN experts stated that the “two men appear to have been targeted for who they are and for their membership of the royal family, rather than for something they have done. The Working Group has no information to suggest that either of them had been involved in any criminal activity.”

On May 16, 2022, the United States State Department responded to a letter dated March 22, 2022, sent by the Vice President of the European Parliament, regarding the ongoing detention of Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud and Abdulaziz bin Salman bin Mohammed Al Saud. In its communication, the State Department shares the Vice President’s concern about the targeting of critics in Saudi Arabia and explains that it has been closely monitoring the situation of Prince Salman and Prince Abdulaziz, while recalling that their cases were included in the 2020 report on human rights in Saudi Arabia.