Bahrain’s high court upholds death sentence against two pro-democracy activists

Bahrain’s highest court upheld death sentence against two activists, Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa, on grounds of political cases.

Bahrain Legal Adviser Ibrahim Sarhan posted on his Twitter account that the ruling session witnessed Moosa’s presence, and Ramadhan’s absence, in protest against the court’s violation of the principle of equality, as the court examines the statements of the prosecution and rejects the denials of the accused.

He emphasized that “the trial did not observe the guarantees and standards of fair trials, in addition to the fact that the evidence of the trial was not realistic, and the ruling on it is based on confessions extracted under torture, as is proven in the report of the Special Investigation Unit.”

In 2014, a Bahraini court issued a death sentence against Ramadhan and Moosa, and the judgment was upheld in appeal and discrimination in 2015, but in 2018, medical reports were revealed confirming that they had been subjected to torture to extract confessions by force, which led to the suspension of the two death sentences by the Court of Cassation. 

The Court of Cassation then asked for the death sentences to be reviewed, but the High Criminal Court of Appeal reissued the death sentences in January.