Brutal Bahraini King killing nearly one a day with lethal chemical gas attacks in lead up to Bahrain F1
Bahrain: Human rights violations continue ahead of F1 Grand Prix
27 March 2012 – BlottR
Last Tuesday, the Bahraini King claimed “significant and broad progress” toward reforms in a report following up earlier recommendations to correct widespread abuse committed during the government’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests last year. Less than a week later, the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) published a report challenging Hamad’s declarations whilst illustrating human rights violations committed in the Kingdom since the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry report (BICI).
In the report published on Monday, the BCHR listed 31 deaths since the BICI report, including 20 due to teargas suffocation. It said that several police officers have been put on “show trials”, but “none were officially charged with murder, but rather only for accidental death or beating that lead to death”. The BCHR also documented 266 arbitrary arrests in 2012, 3 reports of deaths by torture, 600 political prisoners and 100 cases of kidnappings.
Prof. Cherif Bassiouni, the former Chair of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) said in an interview to Al-Jazeera on March 15 that there had not been cases of torture in Bahrain since the BICI report last November. It did not take long for the opposition to react. Soon after, Ali Alaswad, a resigned Bahraini MP, wrote an open letter to Bassiouni, in which he criticized his claim and voiced his disappointment.
“You claim very clearly and confidently that since you and your fellow investigators entered Bahrain there have been no more allegations of torture and mistreatment. I must sadly inform you that this claim is false,” the letter read. “The fact that you cannot recognize this suggests that either you are being fed incorrect information that you are not verifying, or you are remaining willfully ignorant of the reality,” he added before saying, “In January there were two cases of deaths whilst in custody which can be attributed to torture. Since you are clearly not aware of these cases I shall report them to you now and I hope you can change your stance with immediate affect.”
Bassiouni replied to Alaswad with very few and very unconvincing arguments admitting not being aware of new cases of torture and justifying his lack of knowledge with the fact that his mission terminated when the report was published, which, coming from an international United Nations war crimes expert, often called “the Father of International Criminal Law”, is very unprofessional.
This new report comes as another blow for the Bahraini government which has repeatedly attempted to reinforce its image of unity and its capacity to inspire confidence and generate stability ahead of the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix. Despite the government’s claims, the situation has barely improved, if not at all across the Kingdom and the reforms announced have so far been no more than statements. …more
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