Bahrain Crackdown: 7 Female Detainees Declare Open Hunger-Strike

Local Editor

After the al Khalifa regime authorities built an extra barrier to prevent imprisoned women from embracing family members on visits, female detainees in Bahrain have declared on Wednesday that they will go on an open hunger strike.

Women held at Isa Town Detention Centre said they will take no further visits until the prison authorities remove a new glass barrier erected over the table where they meet their families.

The Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy [BIRD] on Wednesday spoke to seven family members of the female detainees.

The families told BIRD that the prison authorities' restrictions on family contact has been inconsistent. They said detainees meet their family at a large marble table, over which they could shake their hands and kiss them, though with difficulty, during past visits. Such embraces did not result in punishment until the penalties imposed on Ebtisam al-Saegh last week.

A female detainee told BIRD the prison officials had indicated that this clampdown on relations between families and detainees was due to an attempt last week by prominent human rights campaigner Ebtisam al-Saegh's attempt to hug and kiss her children during a prison visit.

Sayed Ahmed Al-Wadaei, Director of Advocacy at BIRD, said: "Many of those inmates are solely imprisoned for their political opinion. Now the prison authorities are setting out to make their lives even more miserable by also punishing their families in this denial of ordinary contact."

"It's shameful to see silence from international governments when their training in Bahrain is put to such inhumane use. This must be an alarming revelation that should lead countries such as the UK and Switzerland to immediately end their programs that allegedly empower women in Bahrain," Al-Wadaei added.

In response, the prison administration - headed by Major Mariam Mahmood Al-Barduli - had banned Ebtisam from seeing her family for two weeks and will prevent her from making phone calls to them for a week.

The detainees going on strike today include Hajar Mansoor, the mother-in-law of London-based human rights activist Sayed Ahmed al-Wadaei, as well as Ebtisam Al-Saegh, Najah Al-Sheikh, Medina Ali, Amira Al-Qashami, Rawan Sanqoor and Zaynab Marhoon.

Both, Najah and Ebtisam, had faced assault at the hands of Bahrain's National Security Agency [NSA].

Source: BIRD, Edited by website team