In the last week, Bahrain’s treatment of its citizens and their right to free expression has been repeatedly in the news. Sara Yasin reports on a spate of developments that raise questions about the Bahraini government’s commitment to free speech.

Blogger and activist Ali Abdulemam has been granted asylum in the United Kingdom. Abdulemam’s two years in hiding began shortly after the start of Bahrain’s political unrest in February 2011. He was sentenced in absentia to fifteen years in prison on charges of attempting to overthrow the monarchy.

Abdulemam is the prominent founder of Bahrain Online, a site that created an online space to criticise and discuss the country’s regime in 1998. Initially, he wrote anonymously, but he began to write in his own name in 2001. Public dissent in Bahrain comes at a price: the blogger was first arrested in 2005 and then once more in 2010.

News of Abdulemam’s heroic escape did not amuse Bahrain’s government:

Ali Abdulemam was not tried in court for exercising his right to express his opinions. Rather, he was tried for inciting and encouraging continuous violent attacks against police officers. Abdulemam is the founder of Bahrain Online, a website that has repeatedly been used to incite hatred, including through the spreading of false and inflammatory rumors.

The statement goes on to say that the country “respects the right of its citizens to express their opinion”, but makes a distinction between expressing an opinion and “engaging in and encouraging violence.”

Back in 2010, Abdulemam was jailed, tortured, and accused of being a part of a “terrorist network.” The real threat he posed to the state, as fellow activist Ala’a Shehabi put it last year, was that “his forum offered dissidents a voice.”

So what does “incitement” look like in Bahrain? For documenting a protest on Twitter last December, Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) member Said Yousif, was jailed and charged with “spreading false news.” According to the country’s laws, “the dissemination of the false news must amount to incitement to violence.” As Human Rights Watch’s Middle East director, Sarah Lea Witson put it:

If Bahraini officials believe that an activist is inciting violence by tweeting a picture of an injured demonstrator, then it’s clear that all the human rights sessions they’ve attended have been wasted.

The jailed head of the organisation, Nabeel Rajab, is currently serving a two year sentence for organising “illegal protests.” BCHR released a statement today expressing concerns that Rajab has been transferred to solitary confinement. He has been unreachable since relaying to his wife an account of young political prisoners being tortured earlier this week. Rajab was requesting a visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross, to document the case.

Still, Bahrain insists that freedom of expression is something that it upholds — in fact, it has gone so far as prosecuting individuals for supposedly abusing it. Just yesterday, year-long sentences were handed to six Twitter users for making posts insulting Bahrain’s King Hamad. For hanging a Bahraini flag from his truck during protests in 2011, a man was handed a three-month jail sentence today.

Looks like it might be time for Bahrain to reevaluate how it understands freedom of expression.

More Coverage >>>

• British embassy in Bahrain gets World Press Freedom Day wrong
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The FCO’s World Press Freedom Day blog contains some impressive posts on press freedom in Zimbabwe, Vietnam and other countries.

Unfortunately, the British Embassy in Bahrain seems to have gone somewhat off message. They tweeted earlier:

On #WPFD we asked Bahraini journalists and commentators to write on the freedom of expression in Bahrain ow.ly/kFCFb

— UK Embassy Bahrain (@UKinBahrain) May 3, 2013

The link leads to two articles: one by Anwar Abdulrahman, of the pro-Bahraini regime Akhbar Al Khaleej and its sister paper Gulf Daily News, and one bylined “Citizens for Bahrain“, apparently a pro-government astroturfing exercise.

The pieces themselves are quite something: Abdulrahman is worth quoting at length:

From my desk as Editor-in-Chief, I believe that freedom should be based on humanness, righteousness and debate, not anarchy and terror. For in this era of open skies and the Internet, to misuse freedom is easy. Any story can be fabricated, any person or government defamed at the touch of a computer screen.

Another thought…as much as beasts cannot be left to roam freely, so in human society the feral element’s freedom should be under control.

That’s the Bahraini opposition, many of whom have been locked up for exercising their right to free expression, he’s referring to as the “feral element”.

Citizens for Bahrain, meanwhile, inform us:

It is time to practice this freedom in a suitable manner and not to abuse it. Freedom of the press is certainly a right, but it must be used with care and wisdom. When used such a manner it can be influential in developing and enlightening society, making this society more resilient both in times of trouble and times of peace.

In conclusion, we say this: Express your views openly and honestly; but put your country before your personal interests.

That is to say, “shut up”.

Why the embassy chooses to mark World Press Freedom Day by publishing two articles in support of censorship, and a regime that imprisons protesters, including Index award winner Nabeel Rajab, is a mystery.

Update: The embassy has moved to distance itself from the views expressed in the blog posts.

Padraig Reidy is senior writer for Index on Censorship. @mePadraigReidy

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The survey — a joint effort between researchers at the Qatar campus of the US-based Northwestern University and the World Internet Project — explored media usage in the Arab world. Participants were drawn from eight Arab nations: Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.

The survey questioned participants’ perceptions of the news media, finding that 61 per cent thought the “quality of news reporting in the Arab world has improved over the past two years.” Media credibility declined in countries that experienced revolutions during the Arab Spring. The Saudi Arabian respondents gave their media outlets high marks with 71 [per cent agreeing with the statement, “The media in your country can report the news independently without interference from officials”.

Overall, the survey found high Facebook penetration among respondents who used social media. Ninety-four percent of the social media users had Facebook accounts, 47 per cent used Twitter and 40 per cent used Facebook. Among the Bahrain social media users, 92 per cent had a Facebook account, while just 29 per cent of the Egyptian respondents did.

The survey aimed to assess the use of media — TV, radio, newspapers, books, web — and levels of trust respondents had toward the sources. It also sought to guage how the respondents used the internet to communicate and conduct transactions like banking or purchases.

The results can be accessed at Arab Media Use Study.

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Bahraini officials yesterday claimed that UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, had cancelled his upcoming visit “indefinitely”. Funnily enough, the special rapporteur has denied this claim, saying that the government has actually blocked his visit, which was set to take place next month. The Special Rapporteur said in a release today that officials claimed that his trip could potentially endanger the success of the country’s National Dialogue, which began earlier this year.

Mendez said that the decision “does not enhance transparency with regard to the situation in the country nor demonstrate a commitment to redress impunity regarding any violations. Rather the authorities seem to view my visit as an obstacle rather than a positive factor to the reform process.”

The tiny gulf kingdom has faced unrest since the start of popular protests on 14 February 2011, which have now left 88 dead, according to Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR). 

The US State Department recently released a report evaluating human rights globally, and outlined Bahrain’s troubles with keeping up with its commitments to human rights. The report said that the country’s government has “limited freedom of speech and press through active prosecution of individuals under libel, slander, and national security laws; firing or attacking civilian and professional journalists; and proposing legislation to limit speech in print and social media.”

Bahrain says that reforms are underway, but their effect remains to be seen: according to Human Rights Watch, Bahrain’s authorities “have failed to investigate and prosecute high-level officials responsible for serious human rights violations.” To top it all off, the group also reports that there have been “more than 300 formal allegations of torture and ill-treatment.”

Even though there’s no room for UN experts in Bahrain, it looks like the doors are wide open for another Bahrain Grand Prix. This Monday, Formula 1 head Bernie Ecclestone said he would be pleased to extend the country’s contract for another five years.

“I feel they do a super job and don’t see any problems”, Ecclestone told the BBC.

Let’s recap last weekend’s race: BCHR has reported a total of 96 arrests in the lead up to the race — with 16 protesters arrested the day of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Protests took place in 20 of the troubled country’s villages, with clashes between protesters and security forces. An ITV news crew was forced to leave Bahrain right before the race, after reporting on protests — even though they had the appropriate accreditation. During last year’s race, three Channel 4 journalists were arrested and deported while covering a protest, but officials said that they were cast out for covering protests without media accreditation. I wonder what the excuse was this year?

Last year’s race drew crowds of protesters, who were met with brutal show of tear gas and bird shot pellets from security forces. One man, Salah Abbas Habib, was killed during protests. Bahrain did charge a police officer with murdering Habib, but his case is sadly the exception. In 2011, the race was canceled after 35 people were killed during the country’s crackdown on popular protests at Manama’s now-demolished Pearl Roundabout.  Even though this year’s race went forward, every year this seems to come with a worrying cost.

Sounds like a problem to me.

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Nabeel Rajab, BCHR – winner of Bindmans Award for Advocacy at the Index Freedom of Expression Awards 2012

Index on Censorship has called upon the Bahraini government to release 2012 Index  Freedom of Expression Award winner Nabeel Rajab and other prisoners of conscience, and honour its promises to uphold freedom of expression.

Index’s Chief Executive Kirsty Hughes said:

“The continued imprisonment of Nabeel Rajab and other activists shows that Bahrain is not serious about reform. The targeting of human rights activists and imprisonment of prisoners of conscience shows that government commitments to reform are for now meaningless.

“Index calls on the Bahrain government to respect  the right to peaceful protest and the right to free speech, to end its violations of these rights and to implement fully the recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission for Inquiry (BICI).”

According to the Project on Middle East Democracy, the government of Bahrain has only succeeded in fully implementing three of the 26 recommendations made by the Bahrain Independent Commission for Inquiry (BICI) report in November 2011.

Members of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) have faced repression from Bahrain’s regime for their tireless work documenting human rights violations committed by the government, since popular protests began on 14 February 2011. According to BCHR, there have been 89 deaths since the start of the country’s uprising.

In March 2012, accepting the Index on Censorship Advocacy award on behalf of BCHR, human rights activist Nabeel Rajab said that the international community heard little about uprisings in Bahrain because “we have oil”. He is currently serving a two-year sentence for organising so-called “illegal gatherings”. The founder of BCHR, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, is on hunger-strike to protest his ill-treatment in prison. Alkhawaja is currently serving a life sentence for allegedly plotting to overthrow the ruling regime. His daughter Zainab is also on hunger strike and serving a three-month jail sentence.

In April, international attention will once again turn to Bahrain when it hosts the Formula 1 Grand Prix. Last year, the Bahraini government attempted to use the race to gain positive international attention while continuing to clamp down on protesters who are critical of the regime.

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  — A child painted with the national colours of Bahrain during the uprisings second anniversary protests, in which a teenager was killed

Evidence given by Jeremy Paxman and a senior BBC official to the BBC internal inquiry into its handling of the Jimmy Savile affair will be removed from public transcripts detailing the investigations evidence. Lawyers examining the soon to be published transcripts said that evidence from the Newsnight presenter and global news director Peter Horrocks was potentially defamatory, and was particularly critical of how BBC management handled the criticism arising from the Savile scandal in Autumn last year. The findings of the inquiry, overseen by former head of Sky News Nick Pollard, were published by the BBC in December. The report examined the corporation’s handling of Newsnight’s dropped investigation into the case in 2011, and its later response after Savile was allegedly outed as a paedophile in October 2012. At the time the transcript was produced, those giving evidence reportedly didn’t know the report was to be made public. Overall, less than 10 per cent of the Pollard review transcripts will be redacted before publication.

A powerful new firewall used to censor online activity could be established in Pakistan within the next month. The Pakistani government has allegedly been working with the same technology companies that helped Iran, China and Libya curb online dissent, to allow authorities to block pornographic or blasphemous online content. Pakistan’s interior minister Rehman Malik confirmed the reports on Twitter, saying The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) were in their final negotiations for obtaining the software. The PTA originally tried to introduce a similar $10million measure in 2012, which was quashed after being met with fierce public opposition. Whilst Pakistan claims to use the firewall to protect the country’s internet users from blasphemous and pornographic content, it has already blocked a number of unrelated sites, such as the US-based Buzzfeed.

An NHS whistleblower under investigation for high mortality rates has voiced concerns over patient safety despite a legal gag preventing him from speaking out. Gary Walker warned civil servants that he had been given the same choices that had resulted in the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust scandal. He was fired from his job as chief executive of United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust in 2010 for gross professional misconduct, allegedly because he swore during a meeting. Walker claims he was fired for refusing to meet Whitehall targets for non-emergency patients and then gagged as part of a reported £500,000 settlement emerging from an unfair work dismissal tribunal. He said he was instructed by the East Midlands Strategic Health Authority to meet the 18-week non-emergency target “whatever the demand” and was told to resign when he refused to do so. East Midlands Strategic Health Authority refuted the claims. The Francis report published last week recommended that gagging orders on NHS staff be lifted, orders which Walker said were due to a “culture of fear” within the service. His case has been raised in the commons.

The Israeli government has admitted that “Prisoner X”, the mystery detainee who later committed suicide in solitary confinement, was in fact a spy for Israel. Ben Zygier, as he is now known from reports, was part of Israel’s external intelligence forces known as the Mossad and was arrested in 2010 for charges which still remain unspecified, though they were revealed to be serious. The detention of Australian-Israeli Zygier was reportedly enshrouded in such secrecy that even the prison guards didn’t know his true identity or alleged offence. The information was revealed after a gagging order which forbade the media in Israel from reporting on the case was partially lifted by the Israeli government on 13 February.

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Government officials, as well as members of different political societies were represented at the first meeting on Sunday.

Bahrain’s King Hamad re-opened the door for dialogue in January this year, calling on “representatives of the political societies and independent members of the political community.”

The fresh round of talks, however, has been met with scepticism from some activists.

“The level of distrust between the rulers of the country and the people is so vast, the history of broken promises, and the false pledges of reform make it very difficult to take any state initiative seriously,” campaigner Ala’a Shehabi told Index.

Bahrain has previously made elaborate promises to reform, through initiatives like the Bahrain Independent Commission for Inquiry (BICI), an independent commission initiated by the king to investigate human rights violations following the start of unrest in 2011.

Such efforts, however, have been condemned by rights groups and activist for being more about repairing Bahrain’s shattered international reputation — tarnished by a brutal clampdown on dissent — than it is about an actual interest in reform. Making it no surprise that a renewed call for dialogue has not quelled plans to protest on 14 February.

Maryam Alkhawaja, acting head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights

Acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (which won an Index on Censorship Free Expression Award in 2012) Maryam Alkhawaja told Index that she worries that the dialogue will be used as a PR move, when “there’s going to be a heavy crackdown on the anniversary or before the anniversary.”

Abdulhadi  AlKhawaja and Nabeel Rajab of BCHR are both currently serving jail sentences for their part in protests against the regime.

According to a report released by the Project on Middle East Democracy, only three of the BICI report’s 26 recommendations have been fully implemented.

Ali Al Aswad, a former member of Bahrain’s parliament and member of opposition party Al-Wefaq party, told Index that “the country will not be stable without real reform”, and emphasised the importance of the government putting into place “confidence building measures.”

Shehabi said that “a serious dialogue would be preceded by the release of political prisoners”, and would involve the removal of the country’s Prime Minister (who has been in power for more than 40 years), as well as “the dissolution of Parliament” in order to “discuss how to form a representative body to write a new democratic constitution.”

Al Aswad emphasised that the results of the dialogue “shouldn’t only be an agreement on paper it should also be reflected in the constitution”. He also said that any constitutional changes should be voted on with a referendum.

Still, human rights violations, according to local human rights organisations, are still ongoing in the troubled gulf kingdom. BCHR says that there have been 87 deaths at the hands of security forces since the start of unrest; compared to the initial 30 documented in the BICI report.

For Alkhawaja, human rights “should not be seen as a part of the negotiation” emphasising that human rights “should not be used as a bargaining chip at all”,

While human rights groups will not be a part of the dialogue, US-based organisation Human Rights First emphasised that “Bahrain’s ongoing crisis must be anchored in full respect for human rights”.

According to the state-owned Bahrain News Agency, meetings will be held twice a week, and no high-level government officials have been named as participants in the process.

Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index. She tweets from @missyasin.

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When confronted with the facts of its own brutal crackdown on popular protests and human rights defenders, Bahraini officials usually stick to a routine. They hide behind tired lines of denial and hype supposed reforms. The actual situation on the ground continues to deteriorate — and inaction from the international community has emboldened the government. Most astounding is the silence from one of Bahrain’s greatest allies: the United Kingdom.

The UK government has made countless pledges to push on Bahrain to implement supposed reforms, but has yet to push forcefully on its partner where it counts. Almost a year after the Bahraini government publicly accepted the grim picture of human rights painted in the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry report and its recommendations, the country continues to perpetuate flagrant human rights violations.

It is more important than ever for the United Kingdom’s legislators to question Britain’s relationship with Bahrain — and to place pressure on the government to demand real reform. Bahraini officials like Nasser Bin Hamad Al Khalifa, who was a VIP guest at the London Olympics despite the numerous allegations he tortured protesters, should be shunned by British mandarins. UK legislators must also push on Bahrain to follow through on promises of transparency and accountability; many of those involved in the crimes committed in the past year and half, have either remained in their positions or been promoted.

The United Kingdom’s silence places it in danger of being seen as complicit in Bahrain’s human rights abuses, particularly when the UK has a direct method of influencing Bahrain: through its economic relationship. If it doesn’t halt arms sales, the United Kingdom is ostensibly giving permission to the Bahraini government to violently silence its people. A serious commitment to human rights from the United Kingdom means that a serious conversation about economic and diplomatic sanctions is necessary and important to do.

Political prisoners jailed on trumped up charges need the United Kingdom to press on its friend on the international stage. It is shameful that the UK and the US refused to sign onto a joint-statement issued by 27 countries this year, condemning human rights violations. Despite damning evidence that continues to mount both countries have been shamefully silent on this topic — and this must change.

This isn’t about regime change, or a chaotic dialogue about political reform. It is about something very simple: human rights. Silence from such an important trade partner spells out permission, casting a shadow on the UK’s commitment to free expression and human rights. Bahrainis have started saying that the UK and USA are to Bahrain what Russia is to Syria — enablers.

Maryam al-Khawaja is acting President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights Deputy Director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights. Twitter @MARYAMALKHAWAJA

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