DUBAI: Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court has upheld a sentence of 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes against blogger Raif Badawi on charges of insulting Islam, his wife said on Sunday.

The judgment came despite criticism of the earlier verdict by the United Nations, United States, European Union, Canada and others.

Badawi received the first 50 of the 1,000 lashes he was sentenced to outside a mosque in Jeddah on January 9. Subsequent rounds of punishment were postponed on medical grounds.

“Blogging is not a crime and Raif Badawi is being punished merely for daring to exercise his right to freedom of expression,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa director.

Badawi’s wife expressed fears that the implementation of the flogging sentence “might resume next week”. “I was optimistic that the advent of (the holy month of) Ramazan and the arrival of a new king would bring a pardon for... my husband,” she said. Badawi co-founded the Saudi Liberal Network Internet discussion group. He was arrested in June 2012 under cyber-crime provisions, and a judge ordered the website shut after it criticised Saudi Arabia’s religious police.

The co-founder of the website, Suad al-Shammari, was released from jail in February. But Badawi and his lawyer, Walid Abulkhair, remain behind bars.

Saudi Arabia in early March dismissed criticism of its flogging of Badawi and “strongly denounced the media campaign around the case”.

Badawi’s wife and their three children have received asylum in Quebec, in Canada.

Quebec’s Immigration Minister Kathleen Weil said in March that her government would “continue its defence of Mr Badawi”, saying this was a “clear case of human rights violation”.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Canada, Naif Bin Bandir Al-Sudairy, complained officially. “The kingdom does not accept any form of interference in its internal affairs and rejects... the attack on the independence of its justice system,” he wrote in a letter sent to authorities in Canada.

Published in Dawn, June 8th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play