A political prisoner held in Saudi Arabia in 1996 spoke these words. He and many other former prisoners have revealed a culture of police brutality, torture and ill-treatment in many police stations, prisons and detention centres across the country. Beatings with sticks, electric shocks, cigarette burns and nail-pulling are some of the torture methods often described. Saudi Arabia's criminal justice system facilitates torture. Lack of judicial supervision of arrest and detention, denial of prompt access to relatives and a doctor, and no access to lawyers all leave prisoners extremely vulnerable to abuse.
Torture is used to extract confessions and to enforce discipline.
Sometimes it is inflicted apparently without reason. The judicial punishment of flogging, which amounts to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, is regularly imposed. Offences related to alcohol, breaking strict moral codes and theft are punished by anything from 50 to several thousand lashes, carried out in prison or in public squares with a bamboo stick. There appears to be no upper limit on the number of lashes judges can impose. The most lashes in a single case recorded by Amnesty International is 4,000, imposed on Muhammad 'Ali al-Sayyid, an Egyptian convicted of robbery in 1990.