On 4 July 2025, Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) delivered an intervention during the 59th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. As part of the annual discussion on technical cooperation and capacity-building, ADHRB highlighted the exclusion of independent civil society in the Gulf Cooperation Council states.

We welcome this panel’s focus on technical cooperation and capacity-building. However, in many countries, such efforts remain ineffective without the meaningful inclusion of independent civil society.

Despite repeated OHCHR missions, human rights violations in Gulf countries persist. Throughout the Arabian Gulf, there is no space for independent civil society. Organizations and activists are systematically persecuted for opposing their governments. Exiled civil society activists have faced ongoing reprisals for their advocacy, including prison sentences issued in absentia, denaturalization, surveillance, and retaliation against their families.

State-appointed oversight bodies—such as Ombudsman and the various National Institutions for Human Rights—serve largely symbolic roles. Rather than upholding rights, they whitewash abuses, protect perpetrators, and often portray victims as offenders. Many families of political prisoners state that they submitted multiple complaints to these bodies, but these efforts consistently fail to produce any results.

We urge the OHCHR to establish clear conditions for further capacity-building missions. No such missions should proceed without independent civil society, including exiled defenders, at least as observers under UN auspices, to ensure credibility and help end impunity.

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