Tuesday, 11th December 2012
Chairman: Good evening. Many of you are very well aware of the human rights abuses that have been taking place since the start of the Arab revolutions not just in countries like Egypt and Tunisia but also in places like Bahrain and neighbouring countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Of course these governments have always been implicated in human rights violations but the scale of repression has been unprecedented and I am sure many of the people in the audience have their own personal stories and testimonies about how they have been mistreated by their governments.
We are very honoured to be joined by three eminent human rights activists who will be talking about the human rights situations in these countries.
Lamri Chirouf: Good evening. I am an independent human rights researcher in the MENA area. I would like to talk about what is hindering the improvement of human rights in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia was one of the very first countries to take part in the debate about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights back in 1958 but the human rights situation has been of great concern to human rights activists for a very long time. The reason for this is not because Saudi Arabia does not try to do something about it. The government has tired particularly since 2011 when it introduced a new law for the practice of lawyers.
It followed up with the setting of a human rights society to co-ordinate with international human rights organisations in 2004. This was followed by the establishment of a national human rights commission in 2005 and then it became part of the UN Human Rights Council where it served for three years from 2006 until 2009. It also introduced two major laws one on the court of grievances. This is supposed to be a court which rules against government abuses of its authority. It also introduced judicial reform unprecedented in its history.
All these initiatives have been hindered by deep rooted human rights violations, patterns of deep rooted human rights practices. I will try to explain this. One of these human rights patterns is intolerance. A second one is discrimination and a third is violence and finally there is the absence of the rule of law. Intolerance is seen in the restrictions that the government imposes on everyone. The government is in control of everything. It does not allow freedom of expression or association.
This is enacted in the constitution itself. These restrictions are in the print and publication law and they are also carried out as part of daily practise. Since 2001 further restrictions were imposed using the war on terror as a pretext. A group of academics were arrested and tried back in 2004. One of the charges that was brought against them was that they support terrorism. These academics were concerned about their country’s involvement in the case of the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks in New York. The academics asked why is our country producing people to do this sort of thing. We need change. That was their analysis. They advocated change to prevent this from happening again and they were charged with supporting terrorism. This show you the extent of the restrictions. They were imprisoned for that for a number of years. Some of these people are facing trial because they are still trying to act despite the risks of persecution.
In Saudi Arabic Arabia there are now up to 30,000 prisoners. Many of them are prisoners of conscience held because of their political or religious beliefs. The relatives of these people are asking about them. They say if they have done something wrong they should be brought to trial and sentenced so they know what is going on with them. If they have not anything wrong they should go home.
As we speak now a group of people have formed the Civil and Political Rights Association which is non recognised. One of their demands is to release the 30,000 people who are in prison, many of them political activists. They include some who used violence and are known as terrorists but nothing has been proved against them in an open and transparent trial. That is the situation with regard to intolerance. There is no space for people to engage in political activities.
With regard to discrimination. Number one discrimination is so deep and entrenched both in laws and in practise. The first victim of discrimination are women. Most of you experienced that suspense when the Olympics were taking place in London. Would women take part or not? At the very last minute two women were able to participate on behalf of Saudi Arabia.
Women face severe forms of discrimination in addition to what I have just mentioned. They are not allowed to play sport and are also discriminated against in the workplace because of the strict of enforcement of segregation by sex. Women are not allowed to work where men are. They cannot be judges or lawyers. They are not allowed to walk in the streets without a male guardian with them – someone they can’t marry like their father or brother. They are not allowed to drive or to travel abroad without the permission of their male guardian.
Just before I came here I noticed a piece of news saying that now the government has a system of sms texts that will inform the male guardian if the female is travelling. I wish they spent that energy in helping to get jobs instead of programming mobile phones to send text messages to their male guardians.
There are lot of stories illustrating the discrimination against women. A brother took the case of his sister to a court of law saying that she was married to a man who is not of the same class as the family. He said his sister should divorce him. The judge ruled accordingly and she was divorced. She had two children and could no longer stay with her husband. It meant that she would have to live with her brother but she refused. She went to prison with her five year old son. The husband kept the daughter. He separated them. As a result of campaigning and exposure of the case this decision was reversed and finally after months and months in prison the woman returned to her husband.
I think you have also heard of the cases of 15 school children who lost their lives in a school in Mecca. The school was locked from the outside by the religious police and when there was a fire they prevented the emergency services for entering because the women did not have their scarves on or there would be mixing between men and women. Again another form of discrimination against women. That experience was condemned world wide but it was not a learning experience for the Ministry of Education. It took eight years for them to decide or to instruct all schools that in case of emergency they emergency services should be allowed into the school regardless of whether they are male or female. There are so many other cases that one can talk about in relation to discrimination against women.
There is also discrimination against foreign workers from the employment system which is the sponsorship system. The workers are handed over to the employers and they surrender their passport. The employer becomes totally responsible for them. They are very vulnerable and there are so many abuses which result from that varying from rape and violence against female domestic workers to non payment of salaries or delays in payment of salaries.
The death penalty is used disproportionately in relation to foreign workers who number about eight million. When you look at executions you often find that the proportion is absolutely disproportionate when it comes to foreign workers.
When foreign workers come into conflict with the law there is no one to look after them. They are far away from their homes in a strange country. They are poor. Their embassies do not care too much about them and they have no one to rely on but themselves. They do not even know when they have been sentenced to death.
At least the nationals have their families outside asking about them or trying to lobby dignitaries of their own communities. These foreign workers are in a very disadvantaged situation.
Violence, torture, corporal punishment and the use of the death penalty are other forms of human rights abuse. They are extensively used in Saudi Arabia. When I am talking about corporal punishment I am talking about amputations. There is the kesas an eye for an eye. There was a case of a man who had a fight with another man. He damaged his spinal cord and when the case came to court the judge sent a letter to hospitals asking them if they could also disable the offender to the same extent as the damage he caused to the other publicity. The case was publicised and was dropped in the end.
The final pattern is the absence of the rule of law. The justice system in Saudi Arabia remains secretive. It remains very dependent on the executive. Those who come in conflict with it are not given the opportunity of what we call in judicial terms equality in terms meaning that they have the right to defend themselves in equal terms as the prosecution.
These patterns explain why Saudi Arabia despite trying to improve its human rights record and being involved in human rights mechanisms the progress is minimum. We hope that they should take the issue seriously and move forward and make better progress in their human rights record which is quite concerning for everybody.
Rory Donaghy: (speaking via skype from Gaza) Repression began over a year ago with the UAE five. The spent about eight months in jail and where pardoned in 2011. The next day they were sentenced to three years. Then there were the UAE seven. Some of them were members of the Islah. Some of them were deported. Their citizenships were revoked and they were deported from the UAE. Some of them ended up in Thailand and Comoros islands.
There has now been a renewed crackdown in the UAE which includes the arrest of 64 members of the Islah Party. It even includes a member of the royal family of Sarjah, Sadr Bin Haid Al Qasami who was held under house arrest in Sarjah but has now been moved to the central prison with other activists.
They activists have been denied access to their lawyers. They have been held in incommunicado detention, there have been allegations of torture. They have been held in solitary confinement in prison cells of 2 meters by 1 meter. They have been accused of setting up a military wing and attempting to overthrow the UAE authorities.
The European Parliament responded not long ago and passed a resolution asking for the oppression against these defendants to end. The UAE responded immediately with a PR campaign similar to what the Bahraini government has done.
Last week a 15-year-old blogger was arrested and we heard that 200 members of the political detainees families have had their bank accounts suspended. So the detainees families, not just the political detainees themselves are being punished.
For the first time we have seen small protests in the UAE. One hundred members of the families of the political detainees gathered outside the court building to demand access to their relatives who they had not seen for a long time. When they saw them they had visible signs of torture.
With regard to the future there are no prospects of political reform. Last year the UAE government has recruited a mercenary Columbian army. They hired around 500 Columbian officers to provide security for the regime just in case there is any threat.
Sara Yasin: We have heard about other parts of the Gulf. I will be speaking about Bahrain. I know there are people in this room who are much more knowledgeable about Bahrain than I am. I have been tracking free expression issues in Bahrain since November last year and as you might imagine the state of free expression is very bad right now. I am not going to touch on other human rights issues because that is not what Index covers but I will tell you about what is happening with free expression in Bahrain.
Nabil Rajab a human rights defender today had another hearing and his sentence was reduced for three years to two years. This sounds like it might be a good thing but he is in prison for organising illegal protests. That in itself is a violation of free expression.
Yesterday Zeinab Al Khawaja another human rights defender was sentenced to one month in prison for protesting. In Bahrain it has been very difficult to protest. On October 30th Bahrain placed a ban on all protests.
From a more personal perspective I will say that I was in Bahrain last year for the presentation of the BICI report. I was there with members of other human rights organisations and we all tried to see the bright side. We all said that this was a remarkable thing for the region for a government to say we are going to document these violations and we are going to move forward and to something about it.
Now over a year later I would say that I am disappointed personally. I felt that Bahrain had an opportunity to set an example and to actually try to make things right but unfortunately what we have seen is that the recommendations of the BICI report have not been fully implemented at all. The biggest testament to that is that 13 activists who have been charged with organising protests at Pearl Roundabout are still in prison and have not been released.
Apart from the high profile cases you still have families who are suffering because their children, their relatives are still in prison. There is one father of a student who had spoken to me before and as far as I know his son is still in prison. Students were supposed to not only be allowed to go back to school – they were supposed to be released from prison.
So basically you have people who are in jail for exercising their right to free expression. That is one of the things the BICI report was clear on. It is not even one of the areas that the Bahraini government can contest. It is one of the clear things.
I think that it is difficult to say what is going to happen next for Bahrain. I am not one for predicting things. I think that what has been most disappointing about Bahrain versus other places in the Middle East and North Africa is that it has had multiple opportunities to put things right and it has not taken those opportunities. It is just basically been a situation where there has been a game of denial. You still have people being gone after for things that they say on social media. People are not able to protest or to express their views.
Bahrain really needs to take a hard look and think about how to move forward and honour the types of things that it has promised to do. Free expression is something that is protected by Bahrain’s constitution. It is not just something that is in the recommendations of the BIBI report and I think that it is time for Bahrain to really think about how to implement those things and move forward.
I will say as someone who works for an international organisation we tried to go back to Bahrain. While we were in Bahrain we had meetings with the Minister for Human Rights, we met all these officials and they said to us over and over again you are welcome to come back to Bahrain. I have not had an invitation yet. A lot of other organisations have had a lot of difficult entering the country. It is these very simple things that Bahrain could be doing to make real changes and to move forward.
*Lamri Chirouf (Law Degree, MSC and PhD international relations). He worked in the Middle East Program at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International for 28 years mainly as researcher but also as campaigner and, for a short period, a deputy program director. I have also worked as resident adviser for the American Bar Association in Algiers overseeing a judicial reform project. He is now retired but he sometimes take up consultancy projects on human rights in the MENA Region.
**Rory Donaghy, is the campaign manager at the Emirates Centre for Human Rights. He is currently in Gaza assisting with emergency relief following the Israeli invasion of Gaza a couple of weeks ago.
***Sara Yasin is a Palestinian-American born and raised in the south of the United States. She graduated from North Carolina State University in 2009, and moved to London to study Gender, Development and Globalisation at the LSE’s Gender Institute. Previously, she has been a regular contributor to Muslimah Media Watch and a programme assistant for the Violence is Not Our Culture campaign with Women Living Under Muslim Laws. She is currently an editorial assistant for
Index on Censorship. She mostly writes about identity, Islam, feminism, multiculturalism, and free expression. Her work has been previously featured in Muslimah Media Watch, Times Higher Education Magazine, Ms. Magazine Blog, Jezebel, Racialicious, and the Guardian’s Comment.
