By Insiya Raja and Brian Dooley

Wednesday, February 14, marks thirteen years to the day since hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors took to the streets in Bahrain, demanding democracy and an end to corruption.

The protests were met with a violent government crackdown. Many opposition and protest leaders are still in prison, falsely convicted of being terrorists. The Kingdom’s ruling family curbed the internal backlash and were left unscathed despite committing a series of serious crimes. The monarchy remains in power today, largely because of its loyalty to military allies Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Bahrain’s record on minors

There are many ways to measure how much worse things are now, even more so than they were then, but here is a look at one aspect—Bahrain’s record on minors.

A joint investigation by Human Rights Watch and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) has detailed how two thirteen-year-olds were arrested by authorities and interrogated without the presence of a parent or lawyer in February 2021. According to the father of one of the children, officers beat his son on the head and threatened to rape him, gave him electric shocks, and repeated the rape threat even after his father was allowed to join him. 

In July 2023, the National Institution for Human Rights (NIHR), a Bahraini oversight body which is supposed to push for reform but, in practice, has helped whitewash the government’s appalling record, announced the creation of a Child Rights Commissioner “to protect and promote the best interests of the child, and support the environmental policy of the child, based on the powers conferred on the NIHR by virtue of the establishment law, which grants it the right to follow-up and monitor all human rights issues, including child’s rights.”

The appointment of a Child Rights Commissioner looks like another attempt by the Bahraini government to give the appearance of caring about human rights while, in reality, it continues its abuses. New human rights investigations and laws and bodies have been set up for over the past thirteen years but it is all a charade when measured against whether human rights are progressing or regressing. 

Additionally significant is No 4/2021 on Child Restorative Justice and Protection from Abuse, which came into effect in August 2021 with the aim “to achieve corrective justice”. After the law was passed, in March 2022, six boys were sentenced to a year in detention based on confessions obtained during interrogations where they were denied access to a lawyer or their parents. The boys were all either thirteen or fourteen at the time of the alleged offences, and their detention has been deemed unjust and arbitrary by international human rights groups.

According to research by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD), there are at least forty-two individuals in Jau Prison who were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms (ranging from ten years to life imprisonment) for crimes committed when they were minors between 2012 and 2017. This includes Haider Mulla, who was arrested in 2015 at the age of sixteen and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. In jail, the systematic denial of medical care has caused his health to decline significantly and he has suffered serious health problems which have not been adequately treated. These include losing eight of his teeth without replacement, making eating difficult, and suffering internal bleeding which causes him to vomit blood.

Evaluating 13 years of so-called political reform 

Political reform in Bahrain has not taken place over the last thirteen years. Those of us pressing for respect for human rights are in many ways further back than we were in January 2011. But much has been learned in the years since– that despite their rhetoric on rights, Bahrain’s Western military allies will only back progress, even moderate progress, if there is intense and sustained international pressure.

There have been a few wins—the release of some human rights defenders from prison—but these victories have been relatively rare, and happened only after sustained international public pressure. Despite their demonstrably poor record on human rights, the Bahraini ruling family have not become international political pariahs (although Human Rights First has just announced it called on the US State Department to sanction senior royal Prince Nasser for his role in the 2011 crackdown).

After thirteen years, the world must confront the stark reality of the human rights situation in Bahrain. The first is that real change will not come about from outside pressure leading merely to shallow face-saving reforms. Instead, large-scale reforms must be driven and led from inside the country, and achieving that is understandably challenging and arduous.

The second is that while there is an international part to play, wins are hard to come by, and usually take years of sustained, intense pressure from international human rights groups and some of the more progressive governments. But more is known now than thirteen years ago about how to make those happen, about who has international influence and who doesn’t, and about which reforms are cosmetic and which are real.

Change is coming. It is no longer a matter of if they will happen but when, and it is hard to see things continuing as they are for another thirteen years.