Bahrain Activists Call for Release of Nabeel Rajab, Cite Ongoing Abuse and Government Crackdown
A Bahraini court ordered the release of prominent human rights defender Nabeel Rajab this week — and authorities immediately took him back into custody anyway, opening a new investigation on entirely separate charges before he could walk free.
A Pattern of Arrest, Release, and Re-Arrest
Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and one of the country’s best-known human rights advocates, has cycled through Bahrain’s justice system repeatedly since the 2011 Arab Spring protests he helped lead. This latest episode traces back to his arrest on April 2, 2015, over tweets alleging torture inside Bahrain’s Jaw Prison and criticizing the Saudi-led coalition’s airstrikes in Yemen. He was released that July under a royal pardon issued for health reasons, having served roughly three months of a six-month sentence for “insulting a statutory body.” But prosecutors never formally closed the underlying cases against him — and on June 13, 2016, authorities arrested him again, this time over televised interviews he had given about Bahrain’s human rights record.
That June 2016 arrest kept Rajab in detention for the rest of the year, culminating in this week’s court hearing. Manama’s Fifth High Criminal Court found that prosecutors had failed to establish any evidentiary link between Rajab and the specific Twitter account cited in the Yemen and Jaw Prison tweets case, and ordered his temporary release. Authorities responded by immediately opening a new investigation tied to the 2015 and 2016 television interviews instead — meaning Rajab never actually left custody at all, despite the court’s ruling in his favor.
A Joint Statement From Four Rights Organizations
The whiplash between the court’s release order and Rajab’s continued detention drew an immediate, coordinated response. The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Front Line Defenders, and the Gulf Centre for Human Rights — which together had mandated a joint trial observation mission to monitor Rajab’s case — issued a statement declaring the pending charges “without substance” and demanding he “must be immediately and unconditionally released.”
Human Rights Watch, tracking the case separately, had already been sounding alarms about the toll Rajab’s prolonged detention was taking. By the time of his December court hearing, he had spent more than six months in pre-trial detention solely, in HRW’s assessment, “for peacefully criticizing the government” — a duration the organization argued violated international standards holding that pre-trial detention should be used only as a last resort. HRW’s deputy Middle East director Joe Stork put the injustice in blunt terms: “Keeping him in detention for all these months while the government seeks an expert opinion only compounds the injustice.”
A Career-Long Pattern, Not an Isolated Case
What makes Rajab’s situation particularly notable to observers isn’t just this single instance of a release order being effectively nullified — it’s how consistent a pattern this represents across his entire career as an activist. He was first convicted in August 2012 on charges of “illegal gathering” and “disturbing public order” for organizing demonstrations in Manama, and has been formally barred from leaving Bahrain since November 2014, well before either of the arrests at the center of this latest case. That travel ban has effectively trapped him inside the same legal system repeatedly targeting him, with no option to seek refuge or continue his advocacy work from abroad.
Rajab’s international profile has only grown alongside the mounting charges against him. He had met personally with then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry earlier in the year, and just months before this latest re-arrest, published an open letter under his own name in the New York Times describing his prosecution and urging the Obama administration to use its leverage over Bahrain to address the broader human rights situation. Bahraini prosecutors responded to that letter’s publication by opening yet another investigation, charging him with “spreading false news and statements and malicious rumours that undermine the prestige of the state” — meaning the very act of publicly describing his own legal jeopardy became grounds for a new case against him.
No Clear End in Sight
For activists and international observers watching the case, this week’s court order and immediate re-arrest crystallized exactly what critics have long argued about Bahrain’s approach to Rajab: that legal process functions less as a genuine check on state power than as a revolving door, cycling him between different charges and detention orders whenever one case shows signs of collapsing under its own lack of evidence. Whether the coordinated pressure from four major human rights organizations, combined with continued U.S. State Department statements of concern, would produce any different outcome than the pattern of the preceding five years remained, as this year closed, very much an open question.
For related coverage of press freedom and activist detention, see our piece on the bid to free FSRN contributor Khaled Sid Mohand from Syrian detention, or browse our full International archive.