Nabeel Rajab, IFEX Rise above Bahrain’s repressive scourage – Internet enables loosing of chains

8 June 2011
Bahrain testimony a highlight of “best ever” IFEX conference

Security forces prevented IFEX member Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), from attending the IFEX General Meeting and Strategy Conference in person in Beirut last week. But they couldn’t prevent him from talking about recent human rights abuses in Bahrain via Skype, nor IFEX members and partners who were listening from initiating an international mission to Bahrain in the coming days. This was just one of the many highlights of the IFEX 2011 conference.

The Bahraini government had prevented Rajab from flying to join his IFEX colleagues in Beirut on 29 May. Maryam al-Khawaja, who heads BCHR’s foreign relations department, cancelled her trip after receiving death threats.

Instead, fellow free expression and human rights defenders gathered for a 40-minute call on 2 June, during which Rajab thanked them for their support and welcomed plans for a mission composed of IFEX members and other concerned groups to Bahrain in the coming months.

Rajab also brought them up to date with the rounds of arrests, detentions, assaults and threats that both preceded and followed 1 June when the King cancelled the state of emergency and called for “national dialogue” on reform.

“How can there be a dialogue when people even this morning are being detained?” he asked. If the government is serious about dialogue, it must “stop persecuting people for doing their human rights work, allow journalists to publish freely, stop the bans on blogs,” he said.

Rajab repeatedly thanked IFEX members for shining a light on Bahrain when other internationals failed to do so: “We are victims of the West who won’t criticise the Bahrain government even though they criticised Libya and supported the revolutions in Egypt or Tunisia. …more