RIYADH (AFP) -– Saudi Arabia's domestic security police ignore the country's own laws to hold suspects for years without charges and ignores court orders to release detainees, a human rights group charged on Monday.

The Saudi General Directorate for Investigations, or mabahith, is believed to hold several thousand people allegedly involved in seditious or terror activities, many arrested during the 2003-2006 Al-Qaeda campaign of violence across the country. It also holds a number of pro-democracy reform advocates.
But even after years in the secret mabahith prisons, few are ever charged and tried, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a new report in which it cited former detainees and families of prisoners.
One released detainee told the group that about 20 detainees in a mabahith prison in Jouf, in northern Saudi Arabia, who were all arrested for acts of violence related to national security, remain in jail though their sentences have expired.
It said that 10 months after the Board of Grievances, an administrative court, ordered Imad al-Matrudi's release because he had been held since 2004 without charge, the mabahith refuse to free him.
HRW pointed out that, in what was a major legal reform in the country, in 2002 the Saudi government promulgated a criminal procedure law that stipulated that arrested people be promptly informed of the reasons for their arrest.
The law requires that they be told of the charges they face when they first appear in front of prosecutors within 48 hours of being arrested and stipulates that detainees be brought to trial or freed within six months.
“Saudi Arabia has a legal limit of six months in detention before trial, and some families have challenged their relatives' detention before the Board of Grievances, the Saudi administrative court,” HRW said.
“However, the interior ministry, which is responsible for the mabahith, has ignored the court's rulings ordering the release of detainees held longer than the legal limit.”
“The mabahith acts as if it is above the law,” HRW's Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement.
“King Abdullah's judicial reforms should be measured against the compliance of the security apparatus with basic tenets of the rule of law.”
HRW's report echoed a July 21 report by Amnesty International, which said the interior ministry's counter-terror campaign since 2001 had resulted in a sharp rise in human rights violations.
Both noted that late last year the interior ministry said it would refer 991 accused militants to trial, and the July 8 announcement that 330 had been tried in special security courts, nearly all of them convicted.
Both questioned the procedures in the courts, their secrecy, and the rights accorded the defendants. Saudi justice officials said recently defendants had had access to lawyers to help in their cases.
Whitson branded the trials “sham justice.”
Saudi officials were not immediately available for comment on the HRW report, which was forwarded to several officials ahead of its release.