Redha al-Bouri

Redha al-Boori is one of several journalists detained by Saudi authorities in April 2019. He had previously written about regional politics but like others arrested around the same time, he had not been active recently. Al-Boori had written for the website of Thumar al-Marzouqi, a Saudi writer also detained around the same time. Al-Boori was arrested April 9, according to a statement and Twitter posts by the London-based Saudi rights organization Al-Qst and a statement by the Beirut-based rights organization Gulf Center for Human Rights. Al-Boori had previously written about regional politics, but a CPJ review of his work indicated he had not been active for several years. Al-Boori, along with several other of the detainees, had been connected with Thumar al-Marzouqi, a Saudi writer detained around the same time. He wrote an academic paper for al-Marzouqi’s website in 2015 and had also written a series of op-eds for the Lebanese privately owned newspaper Al-Akhbar analyzing the role of Hezbollah and sectarianism in the Syria conflict in 2014. His arrest was part of a wave of detentions in Saudi Arabia in spring 2019 targeting journalists and bloggers who had written about a range of cultural, economic, political, and social issues and who in many cases had not been active for years. The Washington Post reported that the detained journalists—along with other writers and activists detained around the same time—were not considered especially high-profile or outspoken.