Bahrain

In Prison for Tweets: The Case of Nabeel Rajab

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“I would like to ask Mr. John Kerry now: Is this the kind of ally America wants? The kind that punishes its people for thinking, that prevents its citizens from exercising their basic rights?”—Nabeel Rajab, “Letter From a Bahraini Jail,” New York Times, September 4, 2016

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From the day he was arrested on June 13, Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, has been kept in solitary detention in conditions so squalid that outside observers have verified the “toilet and shower are unclean, unhygienic, and filled with potentially disease-carrying sludge.”

Because he is a prominent human rights activist who has met with the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, Rajab’s imprisonment—and the vaguely vaporous charges that are being employed to hold him prisoner—has attracted that rare diplomatic act: a public statement from the U.S. State Department about the repression and imprisonment of an individual in an ally’s justice system. (Witness the four-plus years of silence in regards the case of one Raif Badawi, the Saudi writer who remains languishing in prison for his written thoughts, not even his activism.)

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said yesterday: “We’re obviously concerned about Nabeel Rajab’s detention and the charges filed against him, and we call on the government of Bahrain to release him. We have concerns about the state of human rights, in general, in Bahrain, and we’re engaging with the government of Bahrain on all of these issues.” The video (after the jump):
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Bahrain’s Brutality: The Story of Parweez Jawad

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

April 26, 2017: The artist Ai Weiwei attracted international headlines in 2015 when he went head-to-head with the Danish plastic brick maker Lego over that company’s refusal to sell him bricks in bulk for an art installation: because he had used the bricks to make portraits of political prisoners around the world, Lego felt the need to declare that it “cannot approve the use of Legos for political works” and it cut Ai off. Art lovers around the world stepped up and collected Legos for Ai and made enough noise that Lego relented and allowed him to purchase the bricks from Lego, as long as any work he produces includes a statement that Lego is not endorsing any political stances.

Ai’s portraits of 176 political prisoners took more than one million Legos to produce. Both numbers, one million and 176, make a similar point: there are many political prisoners around the world and each person’s story is intricate and takes time to tell.

Some of Ai’s faces are famous: Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning. Most of them are not. Mohammed Hassan Jawad of Bahrain (seen in Ai’s portrait at top) is not, but you ought to know about him.
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