Sensemaker: Human wrongs

• Iran’s President Rouhani said US-Iran relations could return at once to their January 2017 state – if Biden apologised for Trump.
• Trump pardoned Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. 
• Baroness Sugg resigned from the UK government in protest over its decision to cut the aid budget.

There are signs that the next US administration will have a conscience. That will mean a recalibration of American relations with two countries whose human rights records have carried little cost these past four years: Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In one, women activists are still in jail for insisting on the right to drive, two years after a ban was lifted. In the other, anyone who even implies criticism of the regime is liable to arrest and worse. Specifically…

In Riyadh yesterday the long-delayed trial of Loujain al-Hathloul was moved to a criminal court intended for terrorists instead of being scrapped. Her crime was to drive a car a few weeks before the ban on women driving was lifted in 2018, and to upload a video of herself behind the wheel. Her supporters hoped for her release as a sign of progress as Riyadh hosted the G20 earlier this week. Instead a minister told the BBC the Kingdom would not be lectured on internal matters. Al-Hathloul has been on hunger strike and according to her sister has been tortured and threatened with rape by Saud al-Qahtani, the alleged ringleader of the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 

In Egypt last week police arrested Karim Ennarah, a prominent activist, in apparent retribution for having met European diplomats – including from the UK, France and Germany – to discuss human rights on 3 November. Ennarah was the second senior figure from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights to be detained this month and is now one of more than 60,000 political prisoners held by President Sisi’s security apparatus, whose methods make those of the Mubarak era look mild. 

Biden has called Saudi Arabia a pariah state and has said he will “defend the right of activists, political dissidents and journalists around the world”. The Middle East’s autocrats seem keen to test that pledge in public, and build bridges in private. Last week the FT reported (£) that the day after Biden declared victory in the US election Egypt hired the DC law and lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck on a $65,000 monthly retainer. 

According to its website, BHFS excels “when the stakes are high and conventional solutions are not enough”. It’ll be interesting to see what Egypt gets for its money.

AstraZeneca stock down
The markets are digesting early Covid vaccine trial data, and their verdict so far is gloomier for AstraZeneca than for Pfizer, BioNTech or Moderna. The reason is continuing confusion (£) over why some participants in the AstraZeneca phase 3 trial seemed to derive 90 per cent protection from the vaccine, and some just 62. When the data were released on Monday the difference was explained, counter-intuitively to some, by the fact that the 90 per cent group got a lower first dose. It has since emerged that they were also younger – under 55 – and therefore less vulnerable to the virus. Why not be clear about this up front? AstraZeneca shares are down 6 per cent this week. Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are up 6, 14 and 11 per cent respectively since their announcements. Tense conversations going on inside the Oxford-AstraZeneca joint venture? You’d have thought so. 

Cup of charge
The WSJ has come out with a long list of tech gadgets for the giving season and my take on their take is that most of them are boring but one could be a godsend ($). It’s an $80 wireless phone charger called the Lexon Oblio that’s shaped like a vase. It disinfects your phone with UV light and stops you looking at it while it charges. Just plop the damn thing in and forget about it. Give this, and you’re giving people their lives back. And if they don’t like it for charging they can always use it for flowers.