The rapid deterioration in the health condition of two prominent rights activists, Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja and Abduljalil Al-Singace, who are serving life sentences in Bahraini jails linked to the 2011 uprising has sparked grave concern.
Al-Khawaja, 61, was sent back to prison on February 28 after security forces denied him access to a cardiologist for a serious heart-related complicacy, his daughter Maryam Al-Khawaja was quoted as saying in Bahraini media.
The rights activist, who was first arrested and put on trial in 2011 for leading peaceful protests that called for fundamental freedoms in the Gulf country, informed his daughter that he was suffering from breathing difficulties and heart palpitations.
After performing various medical tests, a doctor recommended that al-Khawaja be urgently moved to a cardiologist’s care, however, Bahraini security forces “refused to book the necessary appointment,” his daughter said.
Maryam said “a plain-clothed man” at the medical facility insisted his hands be cuffed and that he be taken back to prison.
According to his daughter, Abdul-Hadi believes the refusal to book his appointment was done to punish him because he had protested against being chained.
“I am constantly in a state of anxiety waiting for that call that something happened to my father in their notorious prison, and this latest news has now increased my anxiety tenfold,” his daughter said, concerned about her ailing father’s fate.
She said her father was “dying in their prisons” while the international community, especially the EU and Denmark, was watching it as mute spectators.
The Deputy Secretary-General of the Bahraini political party Al-Wefaq, Sheikh Hussain Al-Daihi confirms that “the participation rate in the sham parliamentary elections did not exceed 35%,” which proves the awareness of the Bahraini people.
The Deputy Secretary-General of the Bahraini political party Al-Wefaq, Sheikh Hussain Al-Daihi
The Deputy Secretary-General of the Bahraini political party Al-Wefaq, Sheikh Hussain Al-Daihi said that “the participation rate in the sham parliamentary elections did not exceed 35%,” thanking the Bahraini people for “exposing the falsity of the electoral process despite the threats and intimidation.”
“Bahrainis are living under the weight of a stifling political crisis and grave human rights violations, and they are committed to the need for a genuine political process that will lift Bahrain out of tyranny and dictatorship and take it to a democratic system and social justice,” Al-Daihi added in a speech on Saturday.
“The authority should learn from the course of what happened today and take a lesson,” he said, explaining that “the people of Bahrain are not naive, and they cannot be deceived by the tricks played by the regime.”
Al-Daihi affirmed that “what happened today will result in a certain council that has lost legitimacy and true representation of the people of Bahrain, and the elections went with only one component, which is the government component.”
“Those who observed today’s scene in Bahrain noticed the reluctance to participate in the sham parliamentary elections process, as the very high rate of boycott among the youth group was remarkable,” he went on to say.
“The people of Bahrain have proven to be conscious, civilized, and capable of accurate diagnosis,” he said, adding that it has a strong will and firm determination, and it “has passed the exam with remarkable success.”
On November 6, Al-Daihi formally announced that his party is boycotting the general elections in Bahrain and explained that the reasons justifying the boycott are diverse but mainly concern the failure to implement a crucial reform, ongoing political repression in the country, and authorizing the zionist entity to meddle with the country’s domestic affairs.
He further said that Bahrainis are continuing to pay a heavy price for their freedoms by getting killed, imprisoned, displaced, dishonored, denaturalized, their mosques demolished, their basic rights infringed on, and the list goes on.
Bahraini cleric Issa Qassem told the people of Bahrain that the elections constitute a test of the populace’s awareness, explaining that to elect means opening the door for Bahraini-citizenship-bearing Israelis to vote for parliament members.
Qassem called for tomorrow to be a day of mourning for the Bahraini people, stressing that participating in the election is like signing a document agreeing to make matters worse and signing a normalization agreement.
Since 2018, the Bahraini authorities have prohibited members of former political opposition parties, not only from running for parliament but also from serving on the boards of directors of civic organizations, under the so-called Political Isolation Law and dissolved the two main opposition groups, namely Al-Wefaq and Waad parties, in 2016 and 2017 respectively, leaving no one else to dispute the autocratic rule of the Kingdom headed by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.
On Saturday morning, Bahrainis went to the polls to elect a new parliament, where over 330 candidates, including 73 women, took part in the run to compete for the country’s House of Deputies 40 seats. Not one of them was found to represent the opposition, as it was banned through the adoption of the Political Isolation Law that prohibits all activists and opponents belonging to the main political parties from running and voting.
Since then, authorities have imprisoned hundreds of opposition figures, including Al-Wefaq’s leader Sheikh Ali Salman, denaturalized many, and executed others.
Hundreds of Bahrainis staged demonstrations across the tiny Gulf kingdom to demand a mass boycott of the parliamentary elections, as the country holds the polls under what rights groups describe as “political repression” by the ruling Al Khalifa regime.
On Friday night, demonstrators took to the streets in the coastal village of Dumistan, carrying pictures of Bahrain’s most prominent cleric Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim, imprisoned political dissidents as well as those killed at the hands of regime forces.
They expressed solidarity with political prisoners and jailed activists, called on people from all walks of the society to stay away from the polls during November 12 elections.
The protesters also called for an end to human rights violations and the release of political detainees.
Elsewhere in the northern villages of Abu Saiba and Shakhura, groups of demonstrators called for an election boycott, a comprehensive political solution amid the Manama regime’s crackdown on dissent, and demanded a transition from the monarchy to the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people, and a new constitution.
A similar rally was staged in al-Muthallath al-Samoud region as well, where participants demanded boycott of the November 12 parliamentary elections and a new constitution.
Earlier, Sheikh Qassim reiterated the call to boycott parliamentary elections, saying participation in the elections amounts to betrayal.
“The responsibility of Bahrainis is to boycott the election, and participation in it is a betrayal,” he said in a televised address broadcast live on Friday on several Arabic-language television networks.
The distinguished Shia cleric noted that the Bahraini parliament acts in favor of the monarch and to the detriment of the Bahraini nation.
Bahrain’s main opposition group al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, in a statement released on September 14, described the boycott of November 12 polls as a national duty, emphasizing that the ruling Manama regime maintains absolute control over the electoral process and seeks to install a weak legislature, whose main task would be to burnish the image of the corrupt Al Khalifa dynasty and cover up its human rights abuses.
It added that the constitutional and political rift between the Bahraini regime and the nation is deepening day by day, the main reason for which, it said, is the lack of any social agreement between the two sides.
In the absence of a real administration, the Al Khalifa regime continues its authoritarian rule by imposing its political, economic, security and social wills on the Bahraini nation, Wefaq said.
Bahrainis head to the polls Saturday. More than 330 candidates, including 73 women, are competing to join the 40-seat Council of Representatives – the lower house of parliament.
“This election will not introduce any change,” Ali Abdulemam, a Britain-based Bahraini human rights activist, said.
“Without the opposition we will not have a healthy country,” he told AFP.
The restrictions have ignited calls for a boycott of Saturday’s elections which come more than a decade after the 2011 popular uprising.
Since then, authorities have imprisoned hundreds of dissidents – including Wefaq’s leader Sheikh Ali Salman – and stripped many of their citizenship.
International human rights organizations have argued that the vote is being held in an “environment of political repression.”
Citing Bahraini civil society figures, the rights groups said the retroactive bans have affected between 6,000 and 11,000 Bahraini citizens.
The elections “offer little hope for any freer and fairer outcomes,” they said.
Bahrain’s most prominent Shia cleric Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim reiterated the call to boycott parliamentary elections, saying participation amounts to betrayal.
“The responsibility of Bahrainis is to boycott the election, and participation in it is a betrayal,” Ayatollah Qassim said in a live address aired on Friday.
He noted that the Bahraini parliament acts in favor of the ruler and to the detriment of the Bahraini nation.
This parliament is a tool to exercise oppression, he said, amid growing calls to boycott the elections.
On Thursday, the cleric wrote in a Twitter post that the sham vote is meant to “slaughter democracy” in the Gulf kingdom.
He said that voter participation would not result in the consolidation of democracy in Bahrain as communities are largely excluded from the political process.
“How would it be possible to strengthen democracy [in Bahrain], whilst elections have originally been designed to destroy it? This is an election whose doors are closed to those who seek democracy,” he underlined.
Meanwhile, Bahrain’s dissolved al-Wefaq National Islamic Society says opposition groups, in a show of outright rejection of dictatorship and repression by the ruling Manama regime, have unanimously agreed to boycott the forthcoming elections.
“In light of the increasingly suffocating atmosphere, dictatorship of the ruling Al Khalifa dynasty, utter disregard to public demands and violation of people’s right to seal their own fate, foreign-based Bahraini opposition groups as well as social and political activists in the country have taken the decision not to cast ballots in the upcoming polls,” al-Wefaq deputy secretary-general Sheikh Hussain al-Daihi said in an interview with the Arabic-language Lualua television network.
Wefaq, in a statement released on September 14, described the boycott of November 12 polls as a national duty, emphasizing that the ruling Manama regime maintains absolute control over the electoral process and seeks to install a weak legislature, whose main task would be to burnish the image of the corrupt Al Khalifa dynasty and cover up its human rights abuses.
It added that the constitutional and political rift between the Bahraini regime and the nation is deepening day by day, the main reason for which, it said, is the lack of any social agreement between the two sides.
In the absence of a real administration, the Al Khalifa regime continues its authoritarian rule by imposing its political, economic, security and social wills on the Bahraini nation, Wefaq said.
The Deputy Secretary-General of the Bahraini political party Al-Wefaq, Sheikh Hussain Al-Daihi, announced that his party is boycotting the general elections in Bahrain.
The reasons justifying the boycott are diverse but mainly concern the failure to implement a crucial reform, ongoing political repression in the country, and authorizing the zionist entity to meddle with the country’s domestic affairs.
The remarks were delivered during a press conference in which Sheikh Al-Daihi said Bahrainis have no power or representation in legislation and legislative processes.
According to the Sheikh, the core issue is that Bahrainis are deprived of a legal state by a small group of elites that carry out most decision-making, manage public wealth and security, and deprive the people of all their rights.
He further said that Bahrainis are continuing to pay a heavy price for their freedoms by getting killed, imprisoned, displaced, dishonored, denaturalized, their mosques demolished, their basic rights infringed on, and the list goes on.
Touching upon the 2002 constitution, Al-Daihi stressed that it has become obvious that the political foundations of the country are based on absolutism.
The system of government in the Kingdom of Bahrain is supposed to be democratic, with sovereignty being in the hands of the people, “the source of all powers.”
But instead, the constitution blends the executive, legislative, and judicial powers together in one framework, which inevitably contradicts the principle that the people are indeed the source of all powers.
To add insult to injury, Bahrain, considering how small it is in size, is now ranking among the worst violators of human rights due to its violent crackdowns on the opposition, the Sheikh said.
The elections meant to elect 40 members of the Council of Representatives are scheduled to be held in Manama on November 12.
But Al-Daihi said it is pointless to accept these “useless elections” as they merely reflect the will of the elite which “consecrate injustice, enslavement, and marginalization that no sane, straightforward, and honest citizen, whose eyes and heart lay on the interests of his people and his country, would ever approve of.”
Sheikh Al-Daihi added that engaging in the electoral process will not only serve to re-perpetuate the crisis and elongate the sentences of political prisoners but will also enable the zionist entity to meddle in Bahraini domestic affairs via diplomatic normalization, which is to be avoided at all costs.
The Sheikh proclaimed that the party Al-Wefaq strongly condemns all means of subjugating people to slavery, exclusionary decision-making processes, and marginalization, which will all remain if the electoral process goes into effect.
He pointed out several defects with the overall engineering of the electoral districts and the subsequent social divisions it generates, the lack of legislative and oversight powers, the participation of the military personnel who amounts to over 17% of the electorate, and the adoption of the Political Isolation Law that prohibits all activists and opponents belonging to the main political parties from running and voting.
Al-Wefaq announces that it is fully boycotting the parliamentary and municipal elections and called on citizens to follow suit, adding that the party expects the lowest level of engagement with it and that acts of threats, intimidation, and coercion by the regime in Bahrain will be to no avail.
On November 5, the party issued a pamphlet titled “139 reasons to boycott the parliamentary and municipal elections.”
One of the reasons listed in the pamphlet reads, “The Parliament’s inability to safeguard the practices of basic rights of free speech and the freedom to protest peacefully, and its neglect of the executive body’s systematic abuses on freedom of expression. The Parliament is a partner in repressing freedoms.”
من أسباب المقاطعة: فقدان البرلمان القدرة على حماية حرية التعبير والتجمع السلمي وقبوله مرغماً بأخطاء وتعديات السلطة التنفيذية على حرية التعبير وغالباً يكون البرلمان شريكاً في تقييد الحريات.
Lebanon – Since 2017, Bahrain has executed five political prisoners by firing squad instead of launching a political dialogue and national reconciliation that ease the prolonged crisis. The execution of those detainees has been part of a broad repressive trend sweeping the tiny Gulf Kingdom since February 2011.
Meanwhile, there are 12 death row detainees who are on death row, all of them are victims of severe and inhumane treatment, 10 could be executed at any moment, without warning, in case the verdicts were ratified by the monarch.
Those victims of torture have convicted based on confessions that they had retracted in court because they were extracted under pressure and torture.
So, the king’s signature is now all that stands between those victims of torture and their execution.
According to rights groups, Manama pays less and less attention to the question of civil liberties and rights in its attempts to tamp down on peaceful dissents. Hence, the trend of Death Penalty has sharply exacerbated in the recent years amid the absence of censure from Western allies, namely Washington and London, whose priority is security and oil not human rights.
Annually, the UK spends $1.59 million on supporting Bahrain’s Special Investigation Unit [SIU] and the Ombudsman who are accused of violating their international and domestic human rights commitments.
Those so-called oversight bodies have failed to investigate torture allegations against two death row inmates Mohamed Ramadan and Hussain Moussa.
“I’d been taken in handcuffs to village of Al-Deir to act out a murder I didn’t commit… It terrifies me to think there is only one chapter left,” says sentenced to death Hussain Musa.
Besides, the authorities is accused of using the terrorism charge to retaliate against number of conscience activists and social justice seekers, a crime which is deemed to be an extrajudicial killing which results of unfair trials.
Bahrain uses the “Anti-Terrorism Act” as pretext to justify illegal sentences against its peaceful citizens only because they exercise their rights for freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, which are guaranteed not only by international covenants but supposedly by the Bahraini constitution.
Amid the absence of fair judicial transparency, perpetrators of human rights violations are not held accountable in a blatant attack against the minimum standards of human rights stipulated in international conventions.
Ali Al-Arab, Ahamd Al-Malali, Abbas Al-Samei, Sami Mushaima and Ali Al-Signace are the 5 inmates who have been sentenced to death so far.
They were arbitrarily executed by firing squads after allegations of their unjust trial, inhumane torture, sexual assault and medical negligence.
Prior to their execution, they met their families; however they hadn’t even known about the visit that was scheduled based on an ambiguous call from the prison’s administration as part of psychological intimidation. Furthermore, while their last visit, their families noticed that the searching measures were specific, exceptional and humiliating.
Currently and before it’s too late, Bahrain must be pressured to immediately commute the death sentences and establish an official moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.
The king must not ratify but urgently quash these death sentences which are a result of sham court proceedings that brazenly flout international fair trial standards.
Welcome to Bahrain, the cemetery of the living, the home of chambers of death, the kingdom of widespread impunity, police brutality, extrajudicial killings and repression.
Welcome to Bahrain, where the most gruesome arts of torture are heinously and systematically practiced by the security services, including the use of electro-shock devices, forced standing techniques, suspension in painful positions [while handcuffed and exposed to extreme cold or hot temperature], medical negligence, beatings, threats of rape or murder and sexual abuse, etc. in order to inflict permanent suffering on the peaceful prisoners of conscience.
Indeed, little has been done to bring justice to those who perpetrated acts of violence and torture against peaceful demonstrators, despite the BICI’s recommendations to persecute those responsible for torture. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry [BICI] was established, in July 2011, allegedly charged with investigating allegations of human rights abuses in connection with the government’s suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations.
”All persons charged with offences involving political expression, not consisting of advocacy of violence, have their convictions reviewed and sentences commuted or, as the case may be, outstanding charges against them dropped,” the BICI’s report recommended.
The authorities; however, have spared no efforts to investigate and prosecute security personnel and high-ranking officials who have involved in or administrated torture. Those include, for instance, Prince Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Lt. Col. Mubarak Abdullah Bin Huwayl and Lt. Shaika Nura Al Khalifa, who were acquitted on all counts.
Prince Nasser, aka the Torture Prince of Bahrain, is the king’s son of the King, has tortured activists during the 2011 pro-democracy protests. Due to his immunity and the prevailing culture of impunity within the country, he has not been held accountable and continues to receive promotions and rewards rather than being imprisoned.
Bahrain’s security services have repeatedly resorted to torture for the apparent purpose of extracting confessions from human rights activists and political detainees. For instance, Maryam Al-Bardouli, Commander of the Isa Town Prison, has also assaulted many female political prisoners especial Zakia al Barbouri, the only remaining female prisoner of conscience.
Lawyer and legal adviser to SALAM human right organization Ibrahim Serhan recounts the severe torture he was subjected to in 2017, describing how he was stripped naked in front of other inmates as officials threatened to sexually torture him, a crime that frequently takes place during interrogation in Bahrain. This practice continues to take; however, many remain silent as they fear retribution or to be stigmatised.
Activists maintain that the international community and in particular the UK have played a central role in covering up torture in Bahrain. The University of Huddersfield, a UK-backed institution, enjoys a suspected multi-million-pound training contract with Bahrain’s Royal Academy of Policing, a notorious hub of torture
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 