The Fight For Human Rights Continues Across The Middle East

The Fight For Human Rights Continues Across The Middle East

The Day of Rage may have been the beginning of Bahrain’s national uprising, but the roots of this civil resistance lay much deeper. The series of protests that erupted on 14 February 2011 were organised exactly ten years after the National Charter, which committed to the transformation of the country into a constitutional monarchy, was approved by nearly 95% in a popular vote. A year after that display of common suffrage, the monarch moved to curtail the newly established democratic powers of the parliament. When Bahranis took to the streets on that morning in 2011, they were reminding the monarch of the unfulfilled democratic transformation that had been promised to them ten years before.

Inspired by similar uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, social media was an integral part in the organisation and coverage of the protests. Abdulhadi AlKhawaja, one of the most prominent Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in Bahrain leading the pro-democracy protests, was an popular influencer. His highly visible position and his long history of building a human rights movement in the GCC made him a target of the state, and on 9 April 2011 he was arrested. Two months and a half later, a military court sentenced him and eight others to life imprisonment, and he is still in prison today, where he wrote of the screams that echo through ‘Building 10, Jaw Prison’ from victims of torture.

High-profile cases such as Abdulhadi’s are a warning to civil society. Since 2011, throughout the Middle East and North African region, governments are becoming stronger and the space in which civil society can operate has been shrinking. Much of the hope that emerged during the Arab Spring has turned into fear.