Call for Bahrain to Implement UN Human Rights Council Recommendations

[UN Human Rights Council in session in February 2012. Image by United States Mission Geneva via Wikimedia Commons] [UN Human Rights Council in session in February 2012. Image by United States Mission Geneva via Wikimedia Commons]

Call for Bahrain to Implement UN Human Rights Council Recommendations

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by PEN International on 25 October 2012.] 

PEN International calls on the Bahraini government to implement recommendations of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), released on 19 September 2012, alongside the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry BIC’s recommendations.

While Bahrain accepted 145 of the 176 recommendations made as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Bahrain, the situation of human rights is still deteriorating.

PEN International is extremely concerned about the ongoing threats of reprisals targeting Bahraini human rights defenders, including writers and journalists, who cooperate with the United Nations (UN) or those who attended the Geneva meeting. Several of these activists have been summoned for interrogation or arrested in the past few days, due to their legitimate peaceful activism for human rights.

On 16 October 2012, activist and president of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights Mohamed Al-Masktai has been summoned for interrogation at Al-Naem police station. He was then arrested and kept in custody to be brought the following day before the public prosecution office for participating in a protest held on 12 October in Manama. He was released after interrogation. While taking part in the Geneva meetings, Al-Masktai reportedly received death threats through anonymous phone calls.

Also, on 23 September 2012, those who travelled to Geneva to participate in the 21st session of the Human Rights Council were accused of “defaming Bahrain” and labelled as “traitors to the country” by pro-governmental newspaper Al-Watan.

In violation of one of the recommendations which states that the Bahraini government must immediately release prisoners who have been convicted solely for exercising their rights to peaceful assembly and free expression during pro-democracy demonstrations in February and March 2011, the Bahraini Appeal Court upheld on 4 September 2012 the sentences against the 14 political leaders and human rights activists including writers and bloggers Abdul Hadi Al- Khawaja and Dr Abdul-Jalil Al-Singace. PEN is seriously concerned for the welfare of Abdul-Jaili Al-Singace, who is in poor health as a result of hunger strike.

The Bahrain Appeals Court has twice postponed the appeal hearing of Nabeel Rajab, the director of Bahrain Centre for Human rights (BCHR), who was sentenced to three years in prison on 16 August 2012 for illegal assembly and another case related to a Twitter post. PEN International protests the continued arbitrary detention of Nabeel Rajab.

Zainab Al-Khawaja, a human rights defender and blogger, was released on 3 October 2012 after serving her two-month sentence, which was handed down on 1 October 2012 for her peaceful opposition activities. Zainab reported that she was exposed to physical violence by police whilst in detention.

Despite promises and commitments on several occasions by the Bahraini authorities that PEN International and other NGOs would have access to the country, PEN is concerned about the lack of cooperation by the Bahraini authorities regarding visa requests which were submitted by the organisation in May 2012. These requests are still pending and the organisation has therefore been hindered in carrying out vital fact-finding work to document human rights abuses.

PEN International calls on the Bahraini authorities to:

  • Release Nabeel Rajab, Abdul Hadi Al- Khawaja, Dr Abdul-Jalil Alsingace, and all those detained solely for the peaceful exercise of their right to free expression immediately and unconditionally;
  • Implement UPR recommendations and the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report;
  • Fulfil its commitments by allowing NGOs to visit Bahrain without restrictions;
  • Put an end to all acts of judicial harassment against activists, journalists, and writers;
  • Ensure that human rights defenders cooperating with the UN be free from any kind of threats, harassment, or reprisals in relation with their human rights activities;
  • Respect the rights to freedom of expression and of peaceful assembly, which constitute necessary fundamental freedoms, and stop the criminalisation of those rights which is not tolerable or justified under any circumstances.
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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