Prince Charles has raised the plight of jailed blogger Raif Badawi with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman.

Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and has received 50 of 1,000 lashes for offences related to setting up a website for Saudi liberals. Before Charles’s trip to the Middle East, Amnesty International UK urged the prince to intervene on Badawi’s behalf.

The prince and the king talked privately via an interpreter at a palace in Riyadh and then sat together for a lavish lunch attended by hundreds of guests. A source said: “It is understood the issue was raised by the prince during his meeting with King Salman. The reaction from the king was not unfriendly.”



Charles, who is on a six-day tour of the Middle East, knows the Saudi royal family well and was among the world figures who travelled to pay their respects following the death of King Abdullah last month.

Simon Collis, Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said before the meeting of Charles and Salman: “Royal-to-royal links have a particular value … these kinds of visits are capable of having significant impact. Any conversation that does happen is not just going to be an exchange of platitudes, because they are past that.”

Sir William Patey, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the BBC that Charles had a way of raising human rights issues that did not make the Saudis “bristle”.



Amnesty says Saudi Arabia has one of the highest rates of execution in the world, that torture and ill-treatment of prisoners is common and discrimination is rife. Some critics of the Gulf state also claim it has funded extremist groups in the region, such as Islamic State.

At the weekend Charles raised concerns about the radicalisation of British Muslims, saying he thought people who were “born here, go to school here, would abide by those values and outlooks”.



Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission, criticised Charles’s visit to Saudi Arabia. He said: “It seems highly hypocritical of Prince Charles to be giving such a gesture of support to the Saudi regime at a time when he claims to be worried about the dangers of so-called radicalisation and British values.



“The prince should know that no country has been more pivotal to the rise of extremism than Saudi Arabia and rubbing shoulders with its leaders is only going to give them more encouragement to continue business as normal.”