UK Lawmakers Urge PM to Raise Human Rights with Bahrain’s Crown Prince

By Staff, Agencies

British lawmakers have called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to push for the release of political prisoners in Bahrain in return for the unconditional financial support the kingdom receives from London.

The plea was made ahead of a visit this week by Bahrain’s Crown Prince and Prime Minister Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa to London.

In a letter seen by Middle East Eye, the British lawmakers questioned the UK government’s allocation of £13 million to Bahrain over the past decade despite a decline in human rights and democratic standards in the kingdom.

The lawmakers singled out the Bahraini Ministry of the Interior’s Ombudsman and the Special Investigation Unit [SIU] within the Public Prosecutors Office as the two UK-funded institutions that were associated with “clear human rights abuses.”

The British MPs also demanded that the future funding of Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior be conditional on the release of some political prisoners and that human rights be central to ongoing free trade agreement negotiations between the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC] and the UK.

“The UK government should not be rewarding Bahrain with a trade deal that is silent on human rights and ethical trade whilst also using taxpayers’ money to fund training to some Bahraini institutions implicated in torture and human rights abuses,” said Lord Scriven, vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Democracy and Human Rights in the [Persian] Gulf and one of the letter’s signatories.

Sayyed Ahmed Al-Wadaei, advocacy director at the UK-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy [BIRD], said with the visit this week, the British government should change its approach to the kingdom.

“Instead of supporting a repressive regime that uses torture and imprisons those expressing peaceful dissent, Rishi Sunak’s government should be speaking out on the case of imprisoned academic Dr. Abduljalil Al-Singace who has spent nearly two years on his strike without solid food over confiscation of his research after being imprisoned since 2011 for his pro-democracy activism.”

Last week, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention urged Bahrain to release Singace who has been on hunger strike without solid food for 700 days.

The 60-year-old is an engineer, a blogger, an academic researcher, and one of the leading figures in the anti-monarchy movement in Bahrain.