Human Rights

A Wife’s Lonely Fight for Her Husband

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A review of Ensaf Haidar’s excellent new book about her life with Raif Badawi

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How does a young mother tell her children that their father—her husband—is in prison for writing what he thinks in a fundamentalist country that oppresses freedom of thought and freedom of expression? How does she tell her children that their father was taken from them because their country punishes thinkers and writers? How does she tell them he was taken from them?

There is no instruction manual for that situation. The moment in which a young mother must live through exactly this moment is only a brief scene in Ensaf Haidar’s newly published memoir of life with and apart from her husband, the writer Raif Badawi, but it is painful to read, because Ensaf (and her co-writer Andrea C. Hoffmann and their skilled translator Shaun Whiteside) bring the reader into the room with her and the children and invite us to feel their terror and confusion.
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An Appalling Arrest in Bahrain

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

When Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was arrested earlier today, he asked the plainclothes police officers who had spent the previous half-hour searching his house and confiscating his cellphone and other electronic devices why they were arresting him.

“We don’t know,” he was told, according to an RT interview with Rajab’s wife Sumaya. “We don’t know, but we have been ordered to do so.” And they took him away. Thirty officers were involved in the raid and arrest, which is believed was led by Bahrain’s Cybercrime Unit.

The arrest comes on the same day that the United Nations Human Rights Council opened its 32nd session in Geneva, Switzerland. Yesterday, six Bahrain human rights activists were prevented from boarding flights from Bahrain to travel to the UNHRC sessions. Bahrain has long employed that tactic of repression: forbidding activists from leaving the country to tell the world what is happening behind closed borders.
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Free Dawit Isaak

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“We will not have any trial and we will not free him. We know how to handle his kind.”
—Isaias Afwerki, President of Eritrea, speaking in 2009 about writer Dawit Isaak

The last time Amnesty International mentioned the case of the imprisoned Eritrean writer Dawit Isaak, it was in its 2011 annual report about Eritrea. Amnesty reported what it believed to be safe to report: that Isaak “remained in detention, allegedly in Eiraeiro Prison. He was reportedly in poor mental and physical health.”
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