Recent news of a serious COVID-19 outbreak inside Bahrain’s notorious Jau Prison is causing international concern. The country’s largest, long-stay men’s prison, and massively overcrowded, Jau is where most of the leaders of the political opposition and civil rights movements are incarcerated.
Sources report that infection rates have risen dramatically, with recent estimates saying that 100 prisoners have tested positive for the virus.
This development has hit the families of detainees especially hard. Their appeals to the international community to exert pressure on the regime to free prisoners of conscience were heeded by some human rights bodies who urged the Bahraini state to release all prisoners of conscience.
Human rights activists have been working relentlessly to highlight the plight of inmates who languish in cells lacking basic sanitation and are denied proper medical care.
On 6 April, Abbas Malallah, a prisoner of conscience who was arrested in 2011 for participating in pro-democracy protests, died in Jau Prison at the age of 50. According to prison officials, the cause of death was a heart attack, but other causes cannot be discounted, including “medical negligence”.
Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said: “The Bahraini government and prison authorities have a clear duty to guarantee the right to health of those in detention and protect them from the risk of infection.” Maalouf urged the authorities to “ensure all prisoners are provided with face masks and adequate hygiene supplies, that they can keep physical distance and are tested regularly”.
The coronavirus outbreak in Jau led to street protests across the country, calling for the immediate and unconditional release of prisoners. These protests come shortly after the tenth anniversary of Bahrain’s short-lived revolution, which erupted on 10 February 2011 and demanded political change in a country ruled by a hereditary dictatorship.
Inmates in Jau Prison also staged a sit-in to protest against their inhumane detention conditions, including the spread of COVID-19, but the action was immediately and brutally repressed by riot police.
The UK’s colonial legacy
Apart from a brief flirtation with democracy in the early 1970s in the immediate aftermath of the British withdrawal from the Gulf, Bahrain has long been ruled by one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Senior members of the al-Khalifa tribe govern Bahrain with an iron-fist policy, supported by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose forces helped crush the 2011 uprising.
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Saeed Al-Shehabi | Radio Free (2021-04-26T10:47:10+00:00) COVID-19 is spreading among Bahrain’s prisoners of conscience. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/26/covid-19-is-spreading-among-bahrains-prisoners-of-conscience-2/
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