Two NGOs took advantage of the presence of “MBS” on French soil to seize the Paris court, on the basis of universal jurisdiction.
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The return of Mohammed Ben Salman to the international scene, as evidenced by his arrival, Thursday, July 28 in Paris, for a work dinner with Emmanuel Macron, does not mean that his concerns, linked to the Khashoggi affair, are finished . Proof of this is the complaint which was filed against him, Thursday morning, before the dean of the investigating judges of the judicial court of Paris, for complicity of torture and forced disappearance.
The initiative emanates from two foreign NGOs, which were formed civil party: Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), an organization for the defense of American human rights, of which Jamal Khashoggi had had the idea, Shortly before his assassination; And Trial International, a Swiss organization which fights against the impunity of the most serious crime authors. The Open Society Justice Initiative Foundation, attached to the defense of international law, joined forces with the approach of the two NGOs.
Journalist in exile in the United States, which chroniced in the pages of the Washington post the autocratic drift of Mohammed ben Salman (“MBS”), Jamal Khashoggi died suffocated by Saudi barbouzes, inside the kingdom of the kingdom , in Istanbul, Turkey, October 2, 2018. His body, dismembered in the bone saw, has never been found. In a report declassified in February 2021, shortly after the coming to power of the American president, Joe Biden, the American information had considered that such an operation could not be carried out without the downstream of the crown prince, who has the upper hand on the security services of the kingdom.
no diplomatic immunity
The complaint has been filed under universal competence, that is to say the capacity of the French judicial system to judge crimes committed out of national soil by foreign nationals, provided that the suspect is on French territory, which seemed to be the case of Mohammed Ben Salman, Thursday morning.
The NGOs behind this initiative maintain that the crown prince, son of King Salman, does not benefit from diplomatic immunity, according to them, only for heads of state. “As a party to the convention against torture and the convention against forced disappearances, France is forced to investigate a suspect like Ben Salman if he is on French territory,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, director executive of Dawn.
The authors of the complaint also call for the intervention of the French judicial authorities by arguing that Turkey recently abandoned the proceedings launched against the members of the Istanbul commando and that their trial, organized in Riyadh in 2019, “was a masquerade”. At the end of this procedure, eight agents of the Saudi intelligence services, simple performers of the operation, were sentenced to sentences oscillating between seven and twenty years in prison.
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