Executions in Saudi Arabia surged last year to a record high, Amnesty International said Monday, as activists increasingly warn about the kingdom's use of the death penalty in non-violent drug cases.

Saudi Arabia executed 345 people last year, the highest number ever recorded by Amnesty in over three decades of reporting. In the first six months of this year alone, 180 people have been put to death, the group said, signalling that record likely will again be broken.

This year, about two-thirds of those executed were convicted on non-lethal drug charges, the activist group Reprieve said separately. Amnesty also has raised similar concerns about executions in drug cases.

Saudi Arabia has not offered any comment on why it increasingly employs the death penalty.

It is one of several countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, that can levy the death penalty on drug-related charges. But the kingdom remains one of the world's top executioners behind only China and Iran — whose execution numbers are often hard to accurately gauge — and its use of executions in drug cases appears to be fuelling that.

Short-lived moratorium on drug-related executions

Amnesty documented the cases of 25 foreign nationals who are currently on death row, or were recently executed, in Saudi Arabia for drug-related offences.  

More than half of those executed this year in the kingdom were foreign nationals, according to Reprieve.

One such national, Egyptian Essam Ahmed, disappeared in 2021 while working on a fishing boat in Sinai. A month later, his family received word he had been detained in Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death for drug trafficking. Ahmed claims he was forced by the boat's owner to carry a package for him at gunpoint.

"We're living in terror, we're scared every morning," said a member of Ahmed's family, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity fearing his comments could impact the case. "Every morning until 9 a.m., we're afraid that they took one of them for execution without us knowing."

Ahmed's story is all-too common, Amnesty said, in a country where an estimated 76 per cent of the workforce is comprised of migrant workers.

"Low-wage migrant workers caught in Saudi Arabia's 'war on drugs' possess little capital to prevent their exploitation at the hands of experienced, fraudulent agents or to afford legal representation that would effectively defend their rights once in Saudi Arabia and facing the death penalty."

In 2021, as part of the crown prince's criminal justice overhaul, Saudi Arabia's Human Rights Commission announced a moratorium on drug-related executions. The moratorium, however, remained in place for just under three years, before it was scrapped without an explanation.

Before that period, Amnesty documented that 76 per cent of the 202 people executed for drug-related offences between 2017 and 2019 were migrant workers.

In a 10-year period review, migrant workers from Pakistan were the most likely to be executed solely for drug-related offences, a total of 155, with 69 migrant workes from Syria and 50 from Jordan executed for drug offences.

Read the Amnesty report:

Crackdowns continue despite modernization

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's day-to-day ruler, highlighted in 2022 that he limited the use of capital punishment to just homicide cases.

"About the death penalty, we got rid of all of it, except for one category, and this one is written in the Qur'an, and we cannot do anything about it, even if we wished to do something, because it is clear teaching in the Qur'an," the prince told The Atlantic.

The executions come as the kingdom continues to undertake bold reforms to diversify its economy as part of its Vision 2030 initiative.

Human rights groups for years have been critical of Saudi Arabia's human rights record. There have been rapid societal changes in Saudi Arabia under King Salman and the crown prince, with women entering the workforce in increasing numbers and also now being allowed to drive.

But the kingdom has also overseen the arrest of women's rights activists, including former University of British Columbia student Loujain al-Hathloul, who was detained for three years.

Saudi Arabia also has imprisoned businessmen, royals and others in a crackdown on corruption that soon resembled a shakedown of the kingdom's most powerful people.

Jeed Basyouni, who directs Britain-based legal non-profit Reprieve's Middle East and North Africa program, insisted Prince Mohammed could change Saudi Arabia's execution policy rapidly if he wanted.

"He could do mass pardons. He could insist on rewriting laws so that they are in line with international law," Basyouni said. "The billions spent on so-called reforms, designed to promote a more tolerant and inclusive kingdom under the crown prince's rule, mask an authoritarian state where daily executions for drug crimes are now the norm."