Amnesty International: Not everything has changed, the government still has very sharply drawn red lines

Devin Kenney – Researcher at Amnesty International

The Bahrain Forum for Human Rights (BFHR) organized a virtual press conference on Saturday May 11 2024, with the participation of Devin Kenney, researcher at Amnesty International (AI), Zainab Khamis, head of the Monitoring and Documentation Committee at the Bahrain Human Rights Society (BHRS), Ibtisam Al-Saegh, head of monitoring and documentation at SALAM for Democracy and Human Rights (SALAM DHR), and Ghina Rebai, researcher at the BFHR. The conference was about the issue of prisoners of conscience in Bahrain and was hosted by Bahraini journalist, Murtada Al-Talbi.

To watch the conference: click here

The following is the speech of Devin Kenney, a researcher at Amnesty International:

Hello, my name is Devin Kenney. I'm the researcher on Bahrain for Amnesty International, which is a job I've been doing since May 2018. And the year before that, for a year before that, I was a researcher with the group Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain.

We're all aware of the large-scale release of prisoners in April for the aid. This was an extremely welcome development and was big news in the Bahraini activist community. But I'd like to address what I think are two more significant points.

One, a positive development, and the other, a negative continuing reality. The positive development is that people have been expanding the means of peaceful protest to keep pressing for their calls for change in Bahrain. And these peaceful protests are not all being suppressed.

The expanding protests are partly an extension of the ones that have been happening in Shia neighborhoods for a long time. They are mainly in reaction to the Gaza war, and they're also partly due to activists' understanding that there is more space for such protests in the current environment. Whatever you assess the reasons are, though, this is an extremely positive development.

If you look at history for cases where positive change has happened, it's almost always happened when people inside the country have struggled to claim their own rights and have used a peaceful appeal to their broader national community as their strategy. I don't think there are many, if any, strong examples where positive change has come from the outside. That's not to say that appealing for moral support to the rest of the world can't help.

I think it's part of what helped things change in South Africa. But I think the primary impetus for change has always come from within the society. I've been really gladdened to see that Bahrainis are using the factors in their favor right now to keep pressing for their rights and to keep doing so in the most effective and peaceful ways, and also gladdened that these efforts have continued and even increased as the government has taken some steps away from the direction of repression.

I'll take three concrete examples. Pardon. One is about the reaction to the Gaza War.

There have been a number of summons and arrests and prosecutions of non-violent protesters at pro-Gaza rallies, but you can't say that this has been uniform. Over the past seven months, there have been many protests that have begun and ended peacefully and without the authorities breaking them up or arresting demonstrators. That's exactly the way it should be, and it's also exactly the way it should be that people should take the experience of these normal protests to keep protesting peacefully and keep reaching for a state where peaceful protest is the new normal and is strong enough and popular enough that it keeps improving governmental behavior.

The second example is the gathering held at the National Institution for Human Rights by several dozen family members of prisoners on the morning of 4 April this year. I know that Ali Mohanna spoke and posted on Twitter under his own name at this gathering. I'm not sure if there are other people who were happy to have their names associated with this in public, but I do know that in an unpublished letter, dozens addressed themselves under their full legal identities to the government to raise their voices for their imprisoned loved ones.

Ali Mohanna was stopped and held for a time afterwards to be given a warning lecture by the police, which is completely inappropriate, but he went home safe afterwards, and so far as I have heard, no charges have been raised against him, which is exactly as it should be.

The third example is from the day I'm recording this video, which is Thursday 2 May 2024. Beginning in the morning in Bahrain today, family members of prisoners gathered peacefully in front of Jaw Prison to demand the release of their loved ones.

It's afternoon as I'm recording this, and on the News Update's Bahrain WhatsApp group that I'm on, there's differing information coming through about whether there have been arrests or other repression at Jaw today. The information on that is still filtering out and conflicting, but it's my sincere hope that everyone who joined that demonstration today walks away free and without any charges against them. The broader point I want to make, though, is that these second two examples of positive, peaceful gathering of people for social change, the gathering at the National Institution for Human Rights on 4 April and the stand-in at Jaw today on 2 May, are exactly the kinds of creative, non-violent, boundary-pushing actions that still give me some hope for Bahrain.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more respectful but dignified, brave, innovative, challenging, and constructive kind of action than the one that took place at the National Institution for Human Rights. If Bahraini citizens on the ground can continue to advocate for themselves in such impressive ways, then for the first time in years I can actually begin to feel some optimism that Bahrain will move forward towards a more rights-respecting future. My other major point I'll make briefly, since I assume that we're all familiar with it, not everything has changed.

The government still has very sharply drawn red lines. With over 1,400 prisoners released last month, it's obvious and I don't think it's lost on anyone who was not released. The group of political, opposition, and activist leaders from the mass uprising of 2011.

That group has gone under different names. One of the more common local ones is “Aromuz,” the leading figures, of whom 10 are still in prison over a decade after their final conviction in September 2012. I would also add Ali Salman, the leader of Al-Wefaq, to this group, even though his imprisonment came at a later stage.

The government did not release any of them in the Eid Pardon, and the government continues to expect silence to be the price paid for release from prison. Bahraini citizen Ali Al-Haji was released from prison in June last year after losing a decade of his life in prison due to a grossly unfair trial raised against him because he joined demonstrations. And now, less than a year after his release, he is already facing charges and possible imprisonment again just because he respectfully but persistently insisted that the Ministry of Interior lift the travel ban he's under.

So the government still expects citizens to be silent and not to express any fundamental criticisms of policy or of the system of government. This isn't new, but what is new is that for the first time in the years since I've followed Bahrain, there's a small margin of space to make such criticisms, and citizens are finding smart and effective ways to use that space. It's my sincere hope that this trend will continue and that within months, or better, the coming weeks or days, we can welcome release of Abdul Hadi Al-Khawaja, Hassan Mushaima, Sheikh Abdul Jalil Al-Muqdad, and many, many other names.