International Judicial Observation Mission Report on the Trial against Human Rights Defender Nabeel Rajab

[Nabeel Raja. Image from fidh.org] [Nabeel Raja. Image from fidh.org]

International Judicial Observation Mission Report on the Trial against Human Rights Defender Nabeel Rajab

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders on 14 February 2013.]

International Judicial Observation Mission Report on the Trial against Human Rights Defender Nabeel Rajab

Introduction

Between September and December 2012, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint programme of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), carried out four missions to Manama (Bahrain) to monitor the hearings of the trial of Mr. Nabeel Rajab, FIDH Deputy Secretary General, President of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), Director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Division, a member of the Advisory Board of the Bahrain Rehabilitation and Anti-Violence Organization (BRAVO), and former Chairman of CARAM Asia.

Mr. Rajab is a prominent human rights activist, well-known at national and international levels. His human rights work has been recognized internationally, but within Bahraini society he remains a figure of controversy. A “hero to protesters” of the Bahraini Spring for his endless monitoring and denunciation of human rights violations and his peaceful participation to the demonstrations, he has been described as a “villain” by the authorities and pro-government groups.

Thanks to his international aura, until May 2012, Mr. Rajab had remained one of the few pro-democracy activists in Bahrain not to have been detained. His subsequent arrest and detention therefore constituted a worrying message that even high-profile and internationally recognized human rights defenders are not immune from detention and repression in Bahrain. His detention had a direct impact on the human rights organisation he chairs in Bahrain, which is one of the most active in documenting and denouncing human rights violations in Bahrain and providing support to victims of such violations, as well as on the functioning of national, regional and international human rights organisations with which he collaborates. The BCHR was one of the three short-listed nominees for the 2012 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.

Mr. Nabeel Rajab has been targeted for his tireless efforts at highlighting gross human rights violations against ordinary citizens, human rights defenders, and actual or perceived political opponents in Bahrain, in particular since the beginning of the popular uprising in the country in February 2011 through the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social network tools and media outlets as well as his participation in public gatherings.

The missions’ delegations sought meetings with Government officials, representatives of the judiciary and the legal profession, academics, lawyers, and other members of civil society in order to undertake a full evaluation of the fairness of the trial. Over the course of these missions, the Observatory’s observers met on various occasions with:

  • Mr. Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa, Minister of Justice and Islamic Affairs;
  • Ms. Sameera Rajab, Minister of State for Information;
  • Mr. Khalifa bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, Director of Human Rights Organisations, Ministry of State for Human Rights;
  • a number of other representatives of the Bahraini legal and judicial systems, including Mr. Naif Yousef, Public Prosecutor, and a judge detached at the Ministry of State for Human Rights;
  • as well as several lawyers, including Mr. Nabeel Rajab’s lawyers and Mr. Mohamed Issa Al Tajer, a prominent human rights lawyer.

The report demonstrates that the trial in appeal against Mr. Nabeel Rajab failed to comply with international standards of fair trial. The entire procedure was fraught with serious human rights violations from the time of arrest through detention, trial, and conviction.

[Click here to download the full report.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412