 I would like to invite our fourth speaker, Sarah Beller. Sarah is the founder and executive director of Justice Project Pakistan. Ms. Beller is the recipient of the 2016 Franco-German Human Rights Prize, and that prize is granted only to 16 human rights activists throughout the world. And in 2016, she was also awarded the National Human Rights Prize by the Federal Ministry of Human Rights. Ms. Beller, I get a laser. That's pretty cool. Okay, hello everybody. How are we doing? I'm the last person between you and coffee, so I'm going to try to go quickly. Okay, so this is my first HRI conference. It's very exciting. It's a whole new field for me. So please excuse me if I use a wrong terminology and trigger somebody in the room. I'm going to try not to do that. So I'm a human rights lawyer from Pakistan running an organization called Justice Project Pakistan. We are a group of lawyers that defend, well, lawyers, activists, and policy people that defend... It's not working. Oh, there is the hammer. That investigate and uncover cases of human rights abuses, and then we file a strategic litigation to bring systemic change. We have an amazing communications team, which is just basically three kids in a room, who devise media strategies and humanize the stories of our clients and place them in the public sphere to change hearts and minds. And then our newest team, under the guidance of some of the people in this room, I'm looking at you, Zavith, in particular, is our advocacy and policy team, which basically take all of the information, analyze the data, and advise decision makers on policy. So in... Ooh, this is not the updated version of my presentation. That's okay. It's okay. It's my fault. There were five versions. Okay, so in 2014, we started noticing that there was something going on in Saudi Arabia vis-a-vis Pakistani prisoners. There was news report after news report of Saudi Arabia executing Pakistanis in their prisons. In fact, there were the highest... We found out that Pakistanis were the highest number of foreign nationals being executed in Saudi Arabia. And we had no idea why or who they were, but the news just kept on coming. So at JPP, we dispatched our investigators to figure out why were so many Pakistanis ending up on death row in Saudi Arabia. So how did we do this? First, we started with the names of the prisoners that were mentioned in these news reports, and we tracked down their family members in Pakistan. And these family members that put us in touch with other families of prisoners that were currently alive and in prison in Saudi Arabia. You can see just the amount of Pakistanis that have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia since 2014. So once we started going into the field, this is the picture that began to emerge. And the picture basically overall was that you had vulnerable Pakistanis looking for labor abroad and engaging, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, which is something that our government profits off of. And then they were being caught in this, to some extent, unregulated or inadequately regulated overseas employment system that had been created. They were then being forced to traffic drugs. Once they were put on the plane to Saudi Arabia, they were arrested in Saudi Arabia and faced a lot of due process violations. So they were kept in in-communicator detention. They were not allowed to contact their embassy. They were treated harshly and asked to sign confessions. If they refused to sign confessions, they were given 30 days to file an appeal against their sentence. By the way, they have no, in Saudi Arabia, you have no right to a lawyer if you cannot afford one. So foreign nationals or poor migrant workers that find themselves in the criminal justice system are usually left at the mercy of a court whose proceedings they do not understand, whose language they do not understand. It's primarily in Arabic. And they're doing all of this and navigating this entire system without a lawyer. So the critical gaps that we identified was that there's a gap in regulation. There's a lack of protection mechanisms. And we also found out that the government of Pakistan does not have a counselor protection policy. And then there are issues in the host countries, which are the ones that I've gone over. So this is an example of one of their migrant workers' families and what they had to endure. I have no idea how to play this. Do I press? No, that didn't do it. I knew this was going to happen. OK. Ooh, thank you. Many Pakistanis travel to Saudi Arabia wishing to perform religious pilgrimages or to go and work and make money and try to fulfill their dreams. For those Pakistanis, however, who get caught up in the criminal justice system, the experience in Saudi Arabia often turns into a nightmare. So what you, I lost my presentation. Can you bring it back, please? Whoever it is out there. Thank you. So what we saw here was the case of Razia Bibi, her husband. They hail from a town called Tobateik Singh. They have three children, two sons and one daughter. Afzal, Razia Bibi's husband, was a sole breadwinner of his family and he worked as a laborer in a textile factory. Then lured by dreams of going to Saudi Arabia and earning a better living for his family, Afzal, despite being uneducated because his family couldn't afford to send him to school, came in contact with an overseas employment promoter, which are these agents that get you that job. The OAP agent prepared Afzal for travel to Saudi Arabia to get a better job. Afzal gathered all of his life savings and paid money for passport and visa processing. The OAP agent then took Afzal to another city instead of the airport city, which was Mardan. Then Afzal under one pretense was told that his flight was delayed, it would go tomorrow. Afzal has never been on a plane before or been to the airport. I did not think that this was unusual. He was given some food by his agent to eat. The food made him sick. He was then given an injection to say, this is going to cure your illness because they won't let you board the plane if you're throwing up and you're the sick. After having that injection that shot, Afzal was very drowsy, hazy and semi-conscious and then he was forced to ingest capsules. When he arrived in Saudi Arabia, he was arrested and he was awarded the death penalty obviously without a lawyer and all of that stuff in 2009. Razia Bibi, his wife, told us that upon hearing the news of his father's sentence, Afzal's son Rameesh fell fatally ill and with no money and no help from the government to pay for his treatment as well as the stress of his father's death sentence, Rameesh ended up, his condition got worse and he passed away two years after his father's imprisonment. So what do you do? I have got to speed up. This timer is my enemy. Okay, so what do we do? How do we defend people in, you know, Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia? We're, you know, an NGO based in Pakistan. The Saudi criminal justice system has a host of problems. How do you get Pakistanis to get better due process rights in Saudi Arabia? Well, we decided to sue our own government for their lack of support to their citizens imprisoned abroad and to do that, we had to figure out what their duties were and in our constitution, there is a provision that says that the government of Pakistan is obligated to uphold the due process rights of its citizens to wherever they may be. No one really focused on the wherever they may be part, but we really latched on to that and we went to court with it. We had to document the government's failures, which basically means you have to identify who are the bad guys in the government that failed to fulfill their duties. So that was the Ministry of Interior, the Bureau of Immigration and Employment, Foreign Affairs, overseas Pakistanis ministry, and then we went to court to see directions for the government to do its job. And these are some of the reliefs that we asked for from the court. Then it went over to our communications team. We had to develop a new narrative for Pakistanis on death row in Saudi Arabia. They were not just drug dealers. These were people looking for an honest living. These were people off of whose back the entire country was profiting because they sent back remittances that show up our national, that help our circular debt situation. Something interesting happened in Pakistan last year. We have a new Prime Minister, Imran Khan. I don't know if people know about him here, but he's a huge cricketing star. And he came to power on the backs of massive support from overseas Pakistanis. In fact, in his inaugural speech, Mr. Khan promised to prioritize their welfare. So what we did was we reframed the conversation around Pakistanis imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. So there's about 11,000 Pakistanis imprisoned all over the world. 3,400 of them are in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a close ally of Pakistan. In fact, every time we have a Prime Minister, we get a nice big present from the Saudi government, which is cash, sometimes undeclared and sometimes just given as a gift. So sure enough, when Mr. Khan became the president, the Saudis promised a $6 billion bailout package to Mr. Khan's government that was much needed. So the way we framed the conversation for the new government was, well, you can go get a one-time payout from the Saudis, which is $6 billion, or you can live up to your election promise, stand up for the rights of Pakistanis in prison in Saudi Arabia, because they are sending you back an average of $7.43 billion of fiscal quarter. And that message we said through op-eds, we had other talking heads right here, we talked to the government, we talked to the new ministers, behind the scenes, in front of the scenes, at the scenes, you name it, we made those arguments wherever anybody else, wherever they would listen. And then something even better happened. In February of this year, with the $6 billion payout, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was invited by the new government for a state visit. So Pakistan really was gonna roll out the red carpet for their best friend. When he was arriving, we thought of this as an opportunity. This is a time to make our own government hold up to its promises. And you know, no guest likes to say no when they're in your house and receiving your hospitality. So we really kicked up the advocacy campaign. Every newspaper, every day before the prince, during the prince's visit, carried an op-ed or some kind of information about Pakistanis on death row. The tricky part was they had banned any critique of the visiting dignitary in the Pakistani media. So you had to couch it very positively. And we did that by not making the story about Mr. MBS, but actually making the story about Mr. Khan and his promises to his own people. And then we were told by the government, expect a surprise. So we got very excited. There was a big state dinner that was gonna be televised live. And all of us at JPP sat together to watch it live. We watched and we watched and we watched our dashing Prime Minister get up and make a speech. And then he finished making his speech and then he sat down. And we were absolutely distraught. We have a JPP WhatsApp group. I don't know if you guys have that. And the messages on it was just doom and gloom. A critical opportunity has been missed. And then suddenly the proceedings are going on and we see our Prime Minister get back up again and he breaks protocol. And he says, I'm sorry, I forgot to say something. And then he launches, I wanted to play the video, but maybe I only get to play one video. So he launches into this incredibly emphatic appeal to the Prince who's completely out of his element has no idea what's going on. On behalf of Pakistani workers who end up in prison in Saudi Arabia. And he asks the Prince to say, these are people looking for an honest living. They're poor and they're vulnerable and they travel to your country far away to build your country and to do work and to earn for their families back home. I humbly request you to treat them as your own and to look upon them with grace and mercy. MBS, I will not say anything about this person because I might get arrested in my own country, was with a very big smile, clearly touched. And he turned around to our Prime Minister and said, Mr. Prime Minister, I cannot say no to Pakistan. I am here as your guest. Think of me as Pakistan's ambassador in Saudi Arabia. We will do what we can. And the next day in the press, 2100 people, Pakistanis in prison in Saudi Arabia had been pardoned by the Prince. Oh my goodness. I'd love to say that's the end of the story. It's not. Saudi Arabia ratchets up its executions right before Ramadan because there's a one long reprieve. And in fact, they've done that again this year. They just executed the first Pakistani woman in many years. But it's a start. And the point of telling this story is that there's always hope with creative and strategic advocacy to get even the cruelest of hearts to be moved in certain situations. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah.