Bahrain should immediately stop the prosecution of prominent human rights activist Nabeel Rajab, who faces up to 15 years in prison exclusively for charges that violate his right to free expression. Photograph by Majeed Tareef.
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Nabeel Rajab was arrested on 2 April past year for comments made on Twitter that criticised the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen.
He has served several prison sentences since setting up the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights in 2002.
She said the protesters attended the rally to voice support for Bahraini political and religious activists and deplore the bad human rights conditions in the kingdom.
Left to right: Nabeel Rajab walks in a 2012 protest march with Ali Abdulemam (currently in exile) and Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, who is also in prison for his political activism.
His family said in June that he has been suffering from an irregular heartbeat and that Bahraini authorities have been reluctant to allow him access to medical treatment. Authorities released him on July 13, 2015, but prosecutors did not close the cases and ordered his re-arrest on June 13, 2016.
On the day of his release, Mr. Rajab was issued a new travel ban based on two outstanding charges, which prosecutors have not dropped.
On Monday, authorities further charged him with “undermining the prestige” of the ruling regime over a letter he wrote in prison, in which he described how he was punished for denouncing Bahrain’s role in the war in Yemen and critiqued the United States’ inconsistency in responding to human rights violations in Bahrain.
From the beginning, I was against the war.
Bahrain should stop the prosecution of one of the kingdom’s leading human rights activists, Human Rights Watch said on Sunday. The delegation included Mohamed al-Tajer, a human rights lawyer; Abdulnabi al-Ekry, a rights activist; Jalila al-Salman, the former vice-president of the dissolved Bahrain Teacher’s Society; Rula al-Saffar, a nurse and human rights activist; and Mohamed Sharaf, president of the Bahrain chapter of Transparency International.
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At the end of the event, the audience was encouraged to show their support for Nabeel Rajab by sharing his fate and case via social media and by taking solidarity photos or writing birthday postcards for him, which will be sent to the West Riffa Police Station in Bahrain, where he is now kept detained. In the island kingdom of 1.2 million people, there are more than 4,000 political prisoners according to 2015 estimates from human rights groups.
