Respect For Their Laws

Britain's favourite fundamentalist head-choppers have once more been showing their dedication to British values, with seventeen executions in the past fortnight demonstrating a commendably no-nonsense attitude to human rights. Further Britishness was evident in the Crown Prince's media proclamation that the House of Saud was getting rid of the death penalty in its entirety, except when it wasn't. In fact, the entirety has reached such heights of Britishness that even David Davis, the sometime Minister for Showing Johnny Euro-Wog What's What, has apparently caught wind of a bandwagon in motion. Davis, who used to be rather rah-rah for capital punishment, has requested his intellectual equal, the Minister for Wogs, Frogs and Misnomer, to intervene on behalf of a Jordanian under sentence for drug-smuggling. After a confession which he says was extracted under torture, an appeal court overturned the guilty verdict, whereupon the head-chopping House of Saud magnanimously decided to give the enemies of the people another chance to get it right. The UN working group on arbitrary detention says the man's nine-year imprisonment has been arbitrary and that he should be released immediately; but then the UN working group on arbitrary detention is presumably unburdened by such grown-up concerns as selling more weapons and training for the profitable slaughter in Yemen.