Al Khalifa implodes Bahrain, destroies labor force while trampling Article 23 of Universal Declaration of Human RIghts

Bahrain Workers’ Rights
8 June, 2011

The more you become involved in the complexities of politics, even within a relatively small country like Bahrain, the more you see the fallacy of that maxim of natural law which states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”[1] . If only this were true. Sadly, it is because we are not all born free and equal that we must fight to claim the rights that we are all supposed to have. It is not enough to sit back and watch as supposedly ‘inalienable’ rights are taken away from others.

The International Labor Organisation know this, and while they may not have as much influence over western governments as they once did, supra-national organisations like the ILO are central in raising awareness about the abuse of labor rights in authoritarian states like Bahrain. From a legal perspective, it is important to note that it is not just ‘abstract’ multilateral treaties that Bahrain ignores when forcing the sacking of hundreds of workers for their political and religious beliefs, but also bilateral treaties which it has signed such as the 2006 US-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement.[2]

Many international organisations have been alarmed that the current repression in Bahrain undermines all of the hard work that reformers on all sides of the political spectrum have done to modernize Bahrain’s anachronistic political system. The American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) noted in a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that the General Federation of Bahraini Trade Unions (GFBTU), created during the reforms of the 1990s, has been targeted by the government, with more than half of its elected leadership sacked. …more