By “these things” he means unjust rulings generally, not lashing a raped woman to ribbons because she violated some archaic cultural taboo. That particular thing is a specialty of Sharialand.

We already sort of knew that the royals and the courts were at odds on this but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

A senior Saudi official on Monday sought to distance his government from a court’s decision to sentence a woman who was gang-raped to 200 lashes.

“Unfortunately, these things happen. Bad judgments occur in legal systems,” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told reporters while in Washington to attend a Middle East peace conference in Maryland…

Faisal said the judgment was being used to vilify the Saudi government even though it was not responsible because the courts are independent.

“Issues like that, bad judgments by the courts, happen everywhere, even in the United States,” he said. “It is a process that is still going on. This is being reviewed by a legal process and we hope it will be changed.”

The reason the courts are independent in what’s otherwise an absolute monarchy is because they apply shari’a, which trumps all earthly powers, of course. The royals are trying to wrest control of the judiciary from the Wahhabis by replacing the current crop of nutjobs on the supreme court with a new court stacked with royal appointees but the Economist warns us not to underestimate the stubbornness of primitive traditions.

In the meantime, just the men we want to help bring peace at Annapolis, eh?