Human Rights

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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One Year Ago: A Public Torture

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Raymond Johansen allowed himself to be tortured one year ago today, August 16, 2015, in solidarity with Saudi writer Raif Badawi.

Johansen was hit 50 times by a friend, Tony Clenaghan, with a thin cane, a switch, in Trafalgar Square, where corporal punishments once upon a time were held in public and frequently, but not since the 1830s. Johansen had difficulty walking afterward and even expressed confusion as to where he was upon speaking with a reporter. (Video below.)

When a caning is administered it sometimes does not look as severe as one thinks a beating would look; even one of the words we employ minimizes the severity: “lashes.” In writing about the Saudi Arabian writer Raif Badawi, who was sentenced by Saudi Arabia in 2014 to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison, I have run into the shallow poverty of available analogies. All language is analogy, metaphor, and I have wanted the words to be sufficient to convey the pain of judicial corporal punishment, but they do not. They can not. Raymond Johansen’s action last year pumped life into the analogies, however.
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Shawkan: Trapped in a Cage

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In a court hearing in Cairo, Egypt, earlier today,the trial of the photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid (“Shawkan”) and the 738 other defendants was delayed again, this time until September 6.

Daily News Egypt reported that two defendants leveled accusations of torture against Egypt’s deputy interior minister, Hassan El-Sohagy, and demanded investigations.
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