Bahrain: Prominent Activist Nabeel Rajab Freed from Prison

The Bahraini authorities have released the activist Nabeel Rajab after five years in detention. 

The Bahraini authorities have released the activist Nabeel Rajab after five years in detention. 

Amnesty International said that Rajab was arbitrarily arrested for tweets via “Twitter”, during which he expressed his views, demanding that all charges against him be dropped, and that the peaceful activists be released.

Rajab was arrested in 2015, after he published a series of tweets in which he criticized Saudi military intervention in Yemen, according to France 24.

Rajab is one of the most prominent Bahraini opposition activists who planned protests in Bahrain in 2011, before Saudi forces entered and ended the sit-ins by force.

In his tweets, for which he was arrested, Rajab also criticized torture in the kingdom’s prisons, and was preceded by a two-year prison sentence for spreading rumors.

The final irrevocable judgment was issued by the Bahraini Court of Cassation in 2018.

In January 2019, the United Nations demanded the immediate and unconditional release of Rajab, which Bahrain rejected.

The General Administration of Anti-Corruption and Economic and Electronic Security said Rajab “published false and malicious tweets through his Twitter account,” according to the German “DW” website.

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Rajab was the head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, which he founded in 2002, alongside Abdul Hadi Khawaja, who is serving a life sentence in Bahrain.

Rajab is Deputy Secretary-General of the International Federation for Human Rights and member of the Advisory Council for the Middle East and North Africa Division of the Human Rights Organization.

Rajab has been arrested several times since 2011, and in recent years he spent a long time in solitary confinement, according to a message published in the American newspaper “The New York Times” in 2016.

In his message, Rajab stated that there are four thousand prisoners of conscience in Bahrain.

According to Amnesty International, the Bahraini authorities stepped up their efforts to crack down on freedom of expression during 2019, strip citizens of their nationalities, and did not allow independent human rights monitors to enter the country.