Bahrain Abuse Intensifies following Unfavorable Abuse Reports

‘Critical’ rights reforms ignored in Bahrain
Gregg Carlstrom – 29 March, 2012 – AlJazeera

Manama, Bahrain – A week ago, Ali al-Singace, 16, was found tied up and half-naked in a garage in Sanabis, just outside the Bahraini capital; he told neighbours that he’d been beaten, stabbed and sexually assaulted by a group of men, and filed a police report later that afternoon.

Within a matter of days, Singace was back at the police station, but this time as a suspect, not a victim: Prosecutors accused him of filing a false police report. He was accused of inflicting knife wounds on himself, a conclusion attributed to a government doctor who conducted a medical examination.

“Yesterday [Tuesday] we tried to have him examined again, to have another doctor review his case, and they refused the request,” said Faten al-Haddad, Singace’s lawyer.

Rights groups here say that the case raises new questions about the government’s willingness to reform its legal system. Singace says he has been abducted several times before, because he refused to work as a police informant, and that the men who seized him last week were plainclothes detectives. “The police didn’t explain how he managed to tie himself up,” one activist said sarcastically.

The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report, released in November, catalogued dozens of problems with Bahrain’s legal system and security forces. Prisoners were routinely held incommunicado, and denied access to their lawyers and families. Torture was routine. Military courts convicted hundreds of people in trials which did not meet basic standards of due process, according to groups like Amnesty International.

The government argues that it has fulfilled most of the report’s suggestions for fixing those problems. “A lot of the major, major ones have been implemented, and you have a lot of them with the ministry of interior, the ministry of justice,” said Abdelaziz bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, an official from Bahrain’s information affairs authority.

But rights groups and lawyers frequently complain about the government’s handling of cases like Singace’s, and that of Abdullah Fardan and Hassan al-Jabber. …more