Human rights activists have condemned the EU’s decision to host the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, at a Brussels summit, cementing his international rehabilitation six years after the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader was one of six Gulf representatives taking part in the first summit between the EU and the Gulf Cooperation Council, which also includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
The gathering, the initiative of the outgoing head of the European Council, Charles Michel, looks likely to expose differences between the two regional blocs on Ukraine, the Middle East and their future ties on trade and access to visas.
“We don’t see eye to eye on all topics. And of course, negotiating a statement with this part of the world is not always easy,” a senior EU official said before the one-day meeting on Wednesday. “To be frank, that’s not easy with our 27 member states.”
Asked whether any of the EU’s member states had qualms about the invitation to Prince Mohammed, a senior EU diplomat said: “The question you raised is not raised here.”
US intelligence agencies concluded in 2021 that the Saudi crown prince had approved the murder of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who lived in exile in the US and was one of the regime’s strongest critics. The killing, torture and dismemberment of the dissident inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul caused global horror, leaving the kingdom briefly an international pariah. Riyadh blamed rogue agents and rejected the US intelligence accounts.
The rehabilitation of Prince Mohammed was well under way in mid-2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine when Joe Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia and greeted the crown prince with a fist bump. The then British prime minister Boris Johnson, and the leaders of France and Germany, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, also held talks in the kingdom with Prince Mohammed. Macron hosted the crown prince in Paris in July 2022, after Prince Mohammed had received a red-carpet greeting in Athens from the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Several senior leaders will not take part in the Gulf summit, which precedes a separate gathering of EU leaders on Thursday. Scholz and the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, will miss the Gulf summit, although Macron will speak for Scholz.
Claudio Francavilla, an associate EU director at Human Rights Watch, said: “MBS [Prince Mohammed] has been portraying himself as a reformist, as a progressive ruler, but the reality is that repression in contemporary Saudi Arabia has never been so strong as it is under his rule. People got sentenced for decades in prison, two decades in prison for tweets, even to death for some tweets.” The EU summit “risks helping him whitewash his image”, he added.
Saudi authorities have executed at least 198 people so far in 2024, the highest number recorded since 1990, according to Amnesty International.
The senior EU official said one objective of the summit was “to make our relationship with [Gulf countries] more strategic”, referring to the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East.
Human rights was “always on the agenda”, the official said, adding that they could not predict which leader may raise the topic. A briefing note released by the EU did not refer to human rights.
The Middle East will dominate the talks, but the EU also wants Gulf countries to sign off on a statement on Ukraine. That has proved difficult, and going into the talks Gulf countries were resistant to even mentioning Russia in the final communique, which is unacceptable for the EU side.
Francavilla argued that the EU could engage with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in other forums. “You don’t need to roll out the red carpet, you don’t need to have a summit to engage. There are many ways in which you engage,” he said. “They meet in the UN, they meet in Unga [the UN general assembly], they meet in other places. This is clearly not the purpose of the summit. The summit is a show of closeness.”
• This article was amended on 16 October 2024 to correct a reference to a Saudi embassy in Istanbul. It was the Saudi consulate.
