The official Saudi Press Agency announced on Saturday that the 198th execution of the year had been carried out, though experts say the news agency has previously under-reported the true number of executions in the country.

Saudi Arabia previously executed 196 people in 2022, the highest annual number of executions that Amnesty had recorded in the country in the last 30 years.

In March 2022, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salma said that the country had “got rid of” the death penalty except for cases where it is mandated under Sharia.

However, in November 2022, the authorities carried the first executions for drug-related offences in nearly three years, reversing a moratorium on executions for such offences which was announced by the Saudi Human Rights Commission in 2021.

Earlier this year, Amnesty analysed the country’s draft penal code, which codifies the death penalty as a punishment and continues to enable judges to use their discretion to impose death sentences for murder, rape, blasphemy and apostasy.

Despite repeated promises to limit the use of the death penalty, the Saudi authorities have ramped up executions while routinely failing to abide by international fair trial standards and safeguards for defendants.

Executions for drug-related crimes have soared this year, with 53 carried out so far — with an average of one execution every two days in July alone — rising from just two drug-related executions in 2023.

The authorities have also weaponised the death penalty to silence political dissent, punishing citizens from the country’s Shia minority who’ve supported “anti-government” protests between 2011 and 2013.

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said: “The death penalty is an abhorrent and inhuman punishment which Saudi Arabia has used against people for a wide range of offences, including political dissent and drug-related charges following grossly unfair trials.

“The authorities must immediately establish a moratorium on executions, and order re-trials for those on death row in line with international standards without resorting to the death penalty.”