On 20 September, ADHRB has delivered an oral intervention at the United Nation Human Rights Council session 51 under item 3, during the interactive dialogue with the Working Group on the use of mercenaries. ADHRB calls on the Working Group to pressure Bahrain to stop enlisting mercenaries to commit crimes of human rights violations.
To the Working Group,
We would like to thank you for your report in which you have advised governments to ensure that activists and human rights defenders are not harmed when they document violations committed by mercenaries. We would like to raise concern here about the persistence of reprisals against political prisoners in the prisons of Bahrain, and the Bahraini people’s deprivation of their right to self-determination.
Since 2011, with the start of the pro-democracy movement, the Bahraini government has trained mercenaries of various nationalities to suppress this movement in order to deprive the people of their right to self-determination, and so they used the mercenaries as officers to arrest and torture individuals participating in the movement and expose them to the worst human rights violations in prison. ADHRB documented more than 294 incidents of excessive use of force by the Ministry of Interior Police, and more than 85 cases of murder during that period, which amounted to torture or extrajudicial killing.
Prisoner Abbas Abd Ali Mohamed, who was arrested in November 2019, was subjected to the worst forms of torture at the hands of a Jordanian officer, and Mohamed Ahmed Mohsen was arrested in February 2018 while participating in protests by the naturalized Pakistani and Jordanian riot police. Political prisoner Ahmed Jaafar, who was deported from Serbia to Bahrain last November, was subjected to the worst forms of psychological and physical torture at the hands of a Jordanian officer and others.
Bahrain is grossly violating many provisions of international humanitarian law such as equality of sovereignty, political independence, territorial integrity of states, and self-determination of peoples by using mercenaries within its territory. Therefore, we call on the Working Group to pressure Bahrain to stop enlisting mercenaries to commit crimes of human rights violations.
