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Category: Torture

  • The Drip-drip of Slanted Gaza Reporting Erodes Our Sense of Right and Wrong

    It is quite possible to take apart virtually any report in the Guardian on Gaza – as I have done with a story in today’s paper – and identify the same kinds of journalistic malpractice.

    Further, I could have taken any paragraph in the article and parsed it in much the same way as I do below. But for the sake of brevity, I have selected four paragraphs (each in bold) that illustrate the abysmal state of reporting about Gaza by Britain’s supposedly most serious, liberal newspaper.

    Note that these misrepresentations are included in a story that is ostensibly critical of Israel. A new report by the United Nations accuses Israel of physically abusing and torturing its staff, including teachers, doctors, and social workers, and of using others as human shields.

    The language and framing used by the Guardian below serve to dilute the impact of the UN report, and thereby give Israel’s behaviour far more legitimacy than it deserves.

    “The Palestine Red Crescent Society said on Tuesday that Israel had released a medic held since a deadly and hugely controversial attack by Israeli troops on ambulances in southern Gaza on 23 March.”

    “Hugely controversial” is the Guardian’s cowardly way of referring to an indisputable atrocity. Israel murdered 15 paramedics and fire crew members in a three-and-a-half-minute hail of bullets on clearly marked emergency vehicles. Israel then crushed the vehicles, and buried them and the crews’ bodies to hide the evidence.

    In what world is that only “controversial”?

     

    “Controversy” implies two sides to an issue. It suggests room for doubt. There is no debate or doubt about what happened, apart from one perpetuated by the Western media. Had Russia done the same to Ukrainian medics, the Guardian would be calling it what it is: a war crime.

    War crimes aren’t “controversial”. They are war crimes.

    “Israel banned all cooperation with UNRWA’s activities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank earlier this year, and claims the [United Nations] agency has been infiltrated by Hamas, an allegation that has been fiercely contested.”

    Again, “fiercely contested” is the Guardian’s weaselly way of giving credence to an obvious Israeli lie. Israel has had many, many months to produce even a sliver of evidence to support its claim that Hamas infiltrated the UN refugee agency, UNRWA – and they have signally failed to do so.

    To call the smear an “allegation” and claim it is “contested” is to suggest that someone apart from Israel takes the smear seriously. They don’t. That is why it is a smear.

    “Rights groups accuse Israel of using a ‘starvation tactic’ that endangers the whole population, potentially making it a war crime.”

    It is not just “rights groups”, and it’s not just an “accusation”. The International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, and one of those crimes is for starving Gaza’s population. Israel’s starvation policy has actually intensified since Israel broke the ceasefire agreement last month. Israeli leaders even proudly admit they are starving the population. So, how is that just an “accusation”?

    And starving the population isn’t just “potentially” a war crime. It is a war crime. It is a prime example in international law of “collective punishment” – collectively punishing civilians for the actions of their leaders. And in this case, “punishment” is starving them to death – the gravest kind of collective punishment and the gravest kind of war crime.

    “Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to continue the offensive until all the hostages are returned and Hamas is either destroyed or agrees to disarm and leave the territory.”

    Journalists usually use the word “vow” to indicate a positive view of a proposed action. A more neutral word here would be “threatened”. Even the conservative International Court of Justice suspects Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. How does “Netanyahu vowed to continue the genocide until all the hostages are returned” sound? Strange? Outrageous? Then, you understand the point.

    Further, why is the Guardian parroting only the most self-serving of Netanyahu’s claims about the aims of Israel’s war crimes (while giving Israel the benefit of the doubt about whether they are war crimes)? There are a whole host of other, far more plausible reasons for Israel destroying all of Gaza’s infrastructure, including its hospitals, and killing and maiming 100,000s of Palestinians, than “getting the hostages back” or “disarming Hamas”.

    They include an aim stated by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that they wish to “encourage” Palestinians to leave their homeland. The wanton death and destruction spread by Israel seem to be what they all mean by “encouragement”.

    The constant drip-drip of skewed language, slanted reporting, and prejudicial framing by the Western media has a purpose. It is intended to erode the reader’s sense of right and wrong, fact and fiction, victim and oppressor.

    It is there to disorientate us, leaving us more open to disbelieving what we can see with our own eyes: that there is a genocide going on, and our own leaders are actively assisting it.

    The post The Drip-drip of Slanted Gaza Reporting Erodes Our Sense of Right and Wrong first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Bad Math

    The bombed remains of automobiles with the bombed Federal Building in the background, April 19, 1995.

    Sometimes we see pictures of ourselves from a decade or three back and think, what was going through their head?

    In other circumstances, we don’t have to wonder. We know.

    It happens to writers a lot. It’s often our and stock-in-trade.

    I know exactly what I was thinking after the Oklahoma City bombing thirty years ago today, and it was not popular. But I recorded it in the April 25, 1995 edition of The Shorthorn at the University of Texas-Arlington. And the math sucks. It’s aged much better than the author.

    In the Aftermath

    To terrorize is to dominate or coerce by intimidation, the threat of violence, or the calculated perpetration of destruction, catastrophe, assassination, murder, etc. In the popular mind, terrorism is qualified by additional connotations. People recognize it as a vicious, cold-blooded attack on defenseless civilians or bystanding innocents. Few crimes are judged with such an unchallenged sense of vehement righteousness. Perpetrators of terrorism are hounded with unparalleled sanctimony and fanatic zeal. I read President Clinton’s pledge in the newspaper: “Nobody can hide any place in this country; nobody can hide any place in this world from the terrible consequences of what has been done.”

    Indeed, I think . . . unless they are American.

    Reports of the Oklahoma City bombing shock, enrage, and sadden me, but an ancient adage haunts my conscience: Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.

    For the last four decades, the United States has perpetrated terrorist activities around the world. Our remorseless work in Vietnam, before and during the war, provided a chilling catalogue of American terrorism. The CIA-planned and CIA-executed assassination of the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, evidenced a harrowing propensity for terrorist realpolitik. And the United States has repeatedly installed and/or subsidized puppet dictators around the world who perform terrorist acts on their own constituencies.

    On a subtler level, in cases such as Israel and, until recently, South Africa, we support governments that permit, if not directly sanction, terrorist enterprises against their own indigenous populations, ranging from summary executions to simple violations of the most basic human rights.

    I see tattered infant-victims of the bombing in Oklahoma City and cringe, rueful and angry.

    But my jaw also stiffens as I recall the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran “Death Squads,” the genocidal military wings of regimes we encouraged and assisted in rises to power in Central America.

    In Guatemala, we supported the coup against and eventual overthrow of democratically elected president Jacob Arbenz. The faction we bet on—and invested in—began an incomprehensible reign of terror, decimating over 440 indigenous villages, conducting an estimated 100,000 political killings (more than 40,000 termed “disappearances”), and leaving over 200,000 children orphaned. And our man in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet, upstaged his Guatemalan counterparts, employing tortures that included inserting sabers in vaginas and disemboweling female victims while their families watched.

    And who can forget the “fraidy-Eighties” under Ronnie Reagan?

    No one in Nicaragua can.

    Men, women and children no different than the citizens of Oklahoma City were afraid all the time, and not just over one incident, but several every week. Besides funding and arming the Contras, we also published and distributed a terrorist handbook for their training. The CIA called it a “Freedom Fighters Manual,” but it included, among other things, detailed instructions (with illustrations) for making and utilizing Molotov cocktails.

    And these are just are just a few of the examples where U.S. involvement in terrorist activities actually became public. There were no doubt countless others. In fact, by popular definition, the largest single terrorist atrocity in human history was the allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany in World War II. Although it occurred during wartime, it was a vicious, calculated attack on a virtually defenseless civilian community.

    The second and third largest terrorist atrocities in world history were probably our nuclear strikes in Japan. These incidents pale in comparison to the widespread pogroms of Hitler, Belgium’s King Leopold, and the Catholic Church, but genocide is not a single act or terrorism—it constitutes a regimen of terrorism (of which our nation could be accused of domestically regarding indigenous people and Blacks and also in much of the Third World in general).

    As Americans, we are largely and more recently unaccustomed to displays of first-hand terrorist bloodshed, but, for much of the rest of the world, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. They live with it every day.

    I shudder at the scenes from Oklahoma City; but I also quake at our bloody ignorance. Did we think our acts of terror would never be reciprocated? Or that our fellow citizens were incapable of them?

    Did we really think we could be immune from terrorism after having so long been one of its chief contagions?!

    American terrorism has, however, evolved. Now, it’s openly encouraged and sanctioned by our commander-and-chief.

    The post Bad Math first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israeli prison system designed to crush Palestinian resilience, says ex-detainee

    Asia Pacific Report

    A researcher says the Israeli prison system aims to subjugate the Palestinian people as rallies across the West Bank marked Prisoners’ Day today while yet another prisoner was reported dead.

    “When you have the statistics that one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and you understand that 50 percent of our population are children under 18 — that means that roughly one in every two male adults has been arrested, subjugated and criminalised by Israeli authorities,” researcher and former detainee Al-Aboudi told Al Jazeera.

    He is the director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development, based in Ramallah, occupied West Bank.

    The goal, said Al-Aboudi, who himself was detained in 2019, is to break Palestinian resilience.

    “It’s only in Israeli jails that you will find doctors, professors, academics, physicists — the creme de la creme of Palestinian civil society is being targeted, incarcerated because Israel doesn’t want any kind of Palestinian agency, any Palestinian collective agency, any kind of Palestinian leadership,” he said.

    Palestinians mark Prisoners’ Day on April 17 each year, reports Al Jazeera.

    Human rights organisations warn that Palestinian detainees are subject to some of the worst conditions in Israeli prisons.

    Detainees tell of torture, starvation
    They are not allowed visits from family, lawyers or doctors, and former detainees tell of torture, abuse and starvation by Israeli prison authorities.

    Musab Hassan Adili, a 20-year-old Palestinian prisoner from the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, was reported to have died on Wednesday night in Israel’s Soroka Hospital, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.


    Palestine marches for prisoners’ freedom.    Video: Al Jazeera

    Adili had been detained in March last year and sentenced to 13 months in Israeli prison. He was supposed to be released in a couple of days, his family said.

    His death brings the number of Palestinian prisoners who have died in Israeli prisons to 64 since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel in 2023.

    An estimated one million palestonians — about 20 percent of their population have been detained by Israeli forces since 1967, affecting nearly every Palestinian family. Many of the prisoners who are children who have been detained without charge, legal or family representation and without due process. Image: Al Jazeera Creative Commons

    ‘Shameless double standard’
    Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has condemned what it calls the “clear and shameless double standard” of those demanding the release of Israeli captives in Gaza but staying silent while thousands of Palestinians languish in Israel’s jails, including women and children.

    In a statement marking Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, PIJ said the “international community is tarnished by its silence regarding the suffering of tens of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, which has continued for decades”.

    Of the nearly 10,000 Palestinians that support groups say are held in Israeli prisons, 3498 are held without charge or trial under what’s known as “administrative detention”.

    PIJ said that 400 children and almost 30 women are among those held, while some 2000 people from Gaza have been arrested by Israeli forces since October 7, 2023, and that the prisoners who have died in Israeli jails suffer from medical negligence and torture.

    According to PIJ, the October 7 attacks on Israel were launched “primarily to impose a genuine prisoner exchange deal that would free prisoners from the occupation’s prisons and alleviate the suffering of our people”.

    “Their liberation has become an unwavering goal in the battle for dignity and freedom,” it said.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Profile in Persecution: Aqeel Muslem AbdulHusain Juma

    Aqeel Muslem AbdulHusain Juma, a 16-year-old minor and school student, was arrested by Bahraini authorities on 14 January 2025 after appearing for a summons before the High Criminal Court. He is the younger brother of 17-year-old detained minor Abbas Muslem AbdulHusain Juma, who was arrested on 26 August 2024 and convicted on similar charges in the same case, including unlawful assembly, rioting, and arson. During his detention, he has endured torture, denial of family visits and legal counsel, deprivation of education, and an unfair trial. He is currently held in the Juvenile section of Dry Dock Prison, serving a one-year sentence.

    In October 2024, at just 15 years old, Aqeel was repeatedly summoned for questioning at Budaiya Police Station. Accompanied by his father during each session, he was released under assurances from the responsible officer that his legal status was secure, he would not be arrested, and there was no cause for concern. On 21 October 2024, at 8:30 A.M., he attended what was supposed to be his final questioning with his father. 

    On 9 January 2025, at the end of his first school term, Aqeel’s family received a summons requiring his attendance before the High Criminal Court on 14 January 2025, along with a referral order—issued on 26 December 2024—for their detained older son, Abbas. The order also referred 15-year-olds Ali Husain Matrook Abdulla and AbdulAziz Husain AlHammadi to the High Criminal Court, all on charges of arson, unlawful assembly, and rioting. When the family reviewed the referral order, they were shocked to find that Aqeel had also been referred to the High Criminal Court in the same case on the same charges and labeled as a “wanted” and “fugitive,” despite having fully complied with all previous summonses.. 

    On 14 January 2025, Aqeel, accompanied by his family, complied with the summons and appeared before the High Criminal Court. The judge ordered his detention until 21 January 2025 pending investigation on charges of 1) arson and 2) unlawful assembly and rioting, brought by the Public Prosecution Office (PPO) on 26 December 2024.

    Between 14 and 28 January 2025, Aqeel was interrogated without the presence of a lawyer or guardian, despite being a minor. His family could not afford legal representation, and the authorities failed to appoint one for him. During this time, officers threatened him and pressured him to confess. To protect his family’s emotional well-being, he refrained from disclosing the methods of torture he endured. On 21 January 2025, the Public Prosecution Office (PPO) extended Aqeel’s detention by another week pending investigation. His trial began on 28 January 2025 without legal representation, as his family could not afford a lawyer, and the court failed to appoint one.

    Aqeel was not brought before a judge within 24 hours of his arrest and was denied legal representation during both interrogation and trial. He was not given adequate time or resources to prepare his defense, nor was he able to present evidence or challenge the charges against him. His family could not afford a lawyer, and the court failed again to appoint one during the trial period. On 11 February 2025, the High Criminal Court sentenced Aqeel, along with his brother Abbas and their friends Ali Husain Matrook Abdulla and AbdulAziz Husain AlHammadi, to one year in prison on charges of 1) unlawful assembly and rioting and 2) arson related to burning tires.

    Following his arrest, Bahraini authorities banned Aqeel’s family from visiting him in detention. The Dry Dock Prison administration has also deprived Aqeel of his right to education. 

    On 11 March 2025, two months after his arrest, Aqeel’s family was finally allowed to visit him at Dry Dock Prison for the first time.

    Aqeel’s arbitrary arrest as a minor, torture, denial of family visits and legal counsel, unfair trial, and deprivation of his right to education constitute clear violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, to which Bahrain is a party.

    Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls upon Bahraini authorities to fulfill their human rights obligations by immediately and unconditionally releasing Aqeel. ADHRB further urges the Bahraini government to investigate allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture, denial of family visits and legal counsel, and deprivation of education, ensuring that perpetrators are held accountable and that Aqeel is compensated for the violations he endured. At the very least, ADHRB advocates for a fair retrial for Aqeel under the Bahraini Restorative Justice Law for Children and in accordance with international legal standards, leading to his release. Furthermore, ADHRB calls on Bahraini authorities to allow regular family visits for Aqeel, permit him to resume his education, and offer the necessary support to enable him to complete his studies.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Aqeel Muslem AbdulHusain Juma appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • ‘They don’t want them to know anything’: Gaza civilians held in Israel not told families had been killed

    A nurse, a civil servant and a teacher, among thousands of Palestinians detained without charges, were not informed their relatives had died in Israeli attacks

    • ‘He insisted we take him to the graves’: the Palestinian hostages coming home to catastrophe

    For six months after it became impossible, Ahmed Wael Dababish still dreamed of a simple reunion: the day he could once again hug his wife, Asma, his two daughters and his young son.

    A nurse from Gaza, Dababish last saw his family in the early hours of one night in December 2023, when Israeli troops attacked a school where they had sought shelter.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The Deputies Who Tortured a Mississippi County

    When Andrea Dettore-Murphy first moved to Rankin County, Mississippi, she didn’t believe the stories she heard about how brutal the sheriff’s department could be when pursuing suspected drug crimes. 

    But in 2018, she learned the hard way that the rumors were true when a group of sheriff’s deputies raided the home of her friend Rick Loveday and beat him relentlessly while she watched. 

    A few years later, Dettore-Murphy says deputies put her through another haunting incident with her friend Robert Grozier. Dettore-Murphy was just the latest in a long line of people who said they witnessed or experienced torture by a small group of deputies, some of whom called themselves the “Goon Squad.” 

    For nearly two decades, the deputies roamed Rankin County at night, beating, tasing, and choking suspects in drug crimes until they admitted to buying or selling illegal substances. Their reign of terror continued unabated until 2023, when the deputies were finally exposed.

    “Rankin County has always been notorious,” says Garry Curro, one the Goon Squad’s many alleged victims. “They don’t follow the laws of the land. They make their own laws.”

    This week on Reveal, reporters Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield with Mississippi Today and the New York Times investigate the Goon Squad, whose members have allegedly tortured at least 22 people since the early 2000s. 

    Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • “Where was the UN?” Asks Freed Israeli Captive. Its Staff Were Busy Being Killed

    Sympathy for Israeli former captive Eli Sharabi must not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to Israel’s propaganda campaign for genocide.

    Israel has found a captive recently released from Gaza willing to regurgitate some of its most nonsensical talking points on the stage of the United Nations. Predictably, those talking points are already being exploited to justify Israel intensifying its slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza – and further bully the United Nations into even greater timidity.

    Eli Sharabi has every reason to feel aggrieved. After all, he not only spent 490 days in captivity in terrifying conditions before his release last month, but emerged to find his family had been killed during Hamas’ break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023.

    Nonetheless, sympathy for his plight should not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to the Israeli government’s propaganda campaign for genocide.

    He has echoed Israeli politicians in claiming that Palestinians in Gaza – all 2.3 million of them, apparently – are “involved” in the mistreatment of the Israeli captives. In other words, he has given succour to the Israeli government’s efforts to justify the extermination of Gaza’s entire population, half of whom are children.

    He has also claimed that Hamas stole aid that entered Gaza to eat “like kings”, while he and the captives starved. In other words, he is bolstering the argument of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel is justified in blocking food and water to Gaza – a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu is being sought by the International Criminal Court.

    But perhaps most ludicrously of all, Sharabi asks of the two largest bodies involved in humanitarian operations on behalf of the destitute, decimated people of Gaza: “Where was the Red Cross when we [the Israeli captives] needed them? Where was the UN?”

    Sharabi, more than anyone, ought to know the answer to his own question.

    Local staff of the UN and Red Cross – or Red Crescent as it is known in Gaza – have spent the past year and a half living under constant and ferocious air strikes, like everyone else in the enclave. Large numbers have been killed and maimed by the US-supplied bombs Israel has been dropping continuously.

    They have certainly not been idle, as Sharabi suggests. When they have not been killed themselves, they have been dealing with the many tens of thousands of dead and the hundreds of thousands of wounded.

    And all the while, they have been desperately struggling to help feed a population that Israel has spent the past 18 months actively starving through its strict blockade of food and water into the tiny territory.

    The job of the UN and Red Cross has been to save life. That is what they have been doing. Their job is not to go on a wild goose chase, trying to find Israeli captives that Israel itself, with all its technological know-how and military might, has been unable to locate.

    Where was the UN?

    Did Sharabi’s Israeli government handlers – led by Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN – forget to explain to him that Israel has formally banned the UN from Gaza? Israel both bars the UN from the enclave, specifically targeting local staff with its weapons, and yet also expects those same staff to track down the Israeli captives held there. How can one even begin to take Israel’s position – or Sharabi’s – seriously?

    Where was the Red Cross?

    Did Sharabi’s Israeli government handlers forget to mention that, also, the Red Cross has not been able to visit a single one of the thousands of Palestinians who have been abducted by Israel from Gaza, including doctors, women and children?

    Unlike the Israeli captives, the location of the Palestinian captives is known. They are being held in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls “torture camps” inside Israel, where sexual assaults and rapes are commonplace.

    Israel has refused the Red Cross access for a simple reason: because it doesn’t want the world to know what it is doing to Palestinians inside those torture camps. And the western media is complying, barely reporting the horrors unearthed by human rights groups and UN investigators.

    Yes, the Israeli captives have gone through a horrific experience. And their greatest trauma – though Sharabi, unlike his fellow Israeli captives, fails to mention it – was living under Israel’s constant bombs: the equivalent so far of six Hiroshimas. None knew from one day to the next whether they would be vaporised by one of the 2,000lb bombs supplied by the US and dropped all over the enclave.

    It is important to hear Sharabi’s account of his captivity on a stage as visible as the UN’s. But it is equally important for the UN to hear from the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel and held in even more horrifying conditions, as repeatedly documented by human rights groups.

    Yet those Palestinian victims, victims of Israeli barbarism, have not been provided with the platform offered to Sharabi. Why? Because Israel gets to decide who speaks at the UN, for both Israelis and Palestinians.

    Unlike Hamas, Israel holds its captives permanently prisoner, even after they have been released from its torture camps. It holds them in a giant open-air concentration camp called Gaza. And they won’t find themselves on a stage at the UN – not unless Israel allows it.

    The post “Where was the UN?” Asks Freed Israeli Captive. Its Staff Were Busy Being Killed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Profile in Persecution: Ali Salman Maki Marhoon

    Ali Salman Maki Marhoon was a 16-year-old minor and school student when Bahraini authorities arrested him without a warrant on 5 August 2024 after summoning him to the Sitra Police Station. During his detention, he has endured enforced disappearance, torture, denial of legal representation, unfair trials, and deprivation of his right to education and family visits, along with ongoing reprisals. He is currently held at Dry Dock Prison, serving a one-year and three-month sentence while awaiting trial for other pending cases.

    On the evening of 5 August 2024, Ali and his friends, Mohammed Isa Khatam and Husain Saleh AlBarri, went to Sitra Police Station after receiving a phone call from their detained friend, Sadiq Hobail, requesting them to deliver his mobile phone. Upon arrival, officers arrested them without presenting any arrest warrant or stating any reason for the arrest. At the station, they were later accused by officers of multiple offenses, including illegal assembly and rioting. Ali’s family attempted to contact him, but their calls went unanswered. After searching multiple police stations, officers repeatedly told them he wasn’t in custody. He remained forcibly disappeared for three days, with his family unaware of his whereabouts or well-being. Only on 8 August 2024, three days after his arrest, was Ali finally allowed to call home, revealing that he was being held at Dry Dock Prison and charged with multiple offenses, including 1) illegal assembly, 2) rioting, 3) arson, 4) incitement of hatred against the regime, and 5) two cases of assault on military personnel.

    Between 5 and 8 August 2024, Ali was interrogated at Sitra Police Station without a lawyer or guardian present, despite being a minor. He was neither allowed to consult his lawyer beforehand nor have her present during questioning. Officers tortured him and pressured him to confess, but he refused. Out of concern for his family’s feelings, he did not disclose the specific methods of torture.

    On 8 August 2024, Ali was brought before the Public Prosecution Office (PPO). His lawyer attempted to attend but was denied entry. He only saw her briefly as he was leaving the PPO, without the chance to speak. Despite refusing to confess, the PPO charged him with multiple offenses, including 1) illegal assembly, 2) rioting, 3) arson, 4) incitement of hatred against the regime, and 5) two counts of assault on military personnel. Following this, he was transferred to Dry Dock Prison.

    On 16 December 2024, Ali and his three fellow detained minors—Mohammed Isa Khatam, Ali Omran, and Hussain Saleh AlBarri—began a hunger strike at Dry Dock Prison to protest their prolonged pre-trial detention and denial of their right to education. They demanded either their release or an expedited trial, along with the right to continue their school education in prison. In retaliation, the prison administration isolated all four in a small, closed cell. On 21 December 2024, an officer urged them to end their strike, but they refused, vowing to continue until their demands were met—even as Ali’s blood sugar dropped to a dangerously low level. That same day, a public prosecutor met with them and recorded their demands, yet the authorities took no action. On 22 December 2024, the minors ended their hunger strike. The next day, Ali was brought before the court again for the illegal assembly and rioting case.

    On 20 January 2025, reports revealed that Ali, along with his friends Ali Omran, Husain AlBarri, and Mohammed Isa Khatam -detained in the Dry Dock Prison- had been subjected to additional punitive retaliatory measures. These included confinement to their cells without family contact or outdoor breaks for up to seven consecutive days and denial of access to purchase basic necessities from the prison canteen, all as punishment for speaking loudly. These harsh measures, effectively isolating Ali and his friends, have taken a severe toll on their mental and physical health.

    Ali was not brought before a judge within 24 hours of his arrest and was denied access to his lawyer during trials. He was not given adequate time or facilities to prepare for his defense, nor was he able to present evidence or challenge the evidence presented against him. On an unknown date, Ali was sentenced to three months in prison for 1) illegal assembly and 2) rioting. On 25 February 2025, he received an additional one-year sentence and a 500 Bahraini Dinar fine for 3) arson, bringing his total sentence to one year and three months. He is also awaiting trial for additional charges, including 4) a second arson charge, 5) incitement of hatred against the regime, and 6) two separate cases of assault on military personnel. 

    For six months, Ali was completely denied family visits. His parents were only allowed to visit him for the first time on 6 February 2025—six months after his arrest.

    Ali continues to be denied his right to resume school education. His family submitted complaints to the Ombudsman and the National Institution for Human Rights (NIHR), urging authorities to allow him to continue his education, but they have received no response. 

    Ali continues to face arbitrary bans from purchasing items from the prison canteen, imposed weekly for the slightest reasons—even for simply requesting drinking water. In February, despite the cold weather, hot water for bathing was unavailable. He also suffers from a shortage of clothing, as the prison administration refuses to allow his family to provide him with additional clothes, including winter wear.

    Ali’s warrantless arrest as a minor, enforced disappearance, torture, denial of legal counsel and guardian access during interrogations and trials, deprivation of family visits, unfair trials, denial of his right to education, and reprisals constitute blatant violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the Convention against Torture (CAT), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, to which Bahrain is a party. 

    Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) urges Bahraini authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Ali. ADHRB also calls for a thorough investigation into allegations of arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture, deprivation of family visits, denial of legal counsel and guardian access during interrogations and trials, denial of the right to education, and reprisals, demanding that those responsible be held accountable. At the very least, ADHRB demands that Ali be granted a fair retrial for the charges he has already been convicted and sentenced for, as well as a fair trial for the pending charges he faces, in line with the Bahraini Restorative Justice Law for Children and international standards. Additionally, he must be granted immediate access to education. Finally, ADHRB calls on Dry Dock Prison administration to immediately cease all retaliatory measures against Ali and his friends, ensuring their access to basic necessities through the prison canteen and the provision of adequate clothing during detention.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Ali Salman Maki Marhoon appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • DOJ Knew About and Used Notorious Homan Square ‘Black Site’

    Scandals don’t get much more disturbing than that of Homan Square. In 2015, the Guardian revealed Chicago Police had allegedly employed torture and days-long unlawful detention at the secretive “black site”-like Homan Square facility, a nondescript warehouse located in Chicago’s west-side Garfield Park neighborhood. Outraged and alarmed by these revelations, politicians and activists clamored for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate human rights abuses at the facility, which still operates today.

    Despite the pleading, the DOJ elected not to investigate Homan Square, and instead conducted a broad investigation of Chicago Police Department use of force practices.

    The post DOJ Knew About and Used Notorious Homan Square ‘Black Site’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Report: Rohingya militant groups kill, torture community’s refugees in Bangladesh

    WASHINGTON and DHAKA – On New Year’s day last year, a Rohingya community leader, Mohammad Faisal, shared a poem he wrote about fear and violence in Bangladesh refugee camps and shared it on social media.

    Three days later, suspected militants from his own community abducted him under the cover of darkness and shot him dead for doing so, Southeast Asian NGO Fortify Rights said in a report released Tuesday.

    “Rohingya rebel members in Bangladesh are killing, abducting, torturing, and threatening Rohingya refugees arriving from Myanmar, which may amount to war crimes,” Fortify Rights said in a press statement accompanying the report.

    Its 78-page report, “I May Be Killed Any Moment,” noted that three key elements must be present to establish a war crime – an armed conflict, a prohibited act committed against a protected person and a nexus between the conflict and the act committed.

    “[F]ortify Rights has reasonable grounds to believe that all such elements are satisfied.”

    The new report documents killings, abductions, torture, and other violations against Rohingya refugees committed, Fortify Rights says, by mainly two rival militant groups, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, and Rohingya Solidarity Organization, or RSO.

    The report draws on interviews with 116 people, including Rohingya survivors and eyewitnesses, Rohingya militants, U.N. officials, humanitarian aid workers, and others, about the ongoing violence in the camps.

    It said that killings of Rohingya refugees by Rohingya militant groups in Bangladesh’s refugee camps had doubled year-on-year since 2021, with a total of at least 219 from then until last year.

    However, the more than 90 people killed in 2023 included dozens of reported members of the two rival militant groups killed in clashes between them, Fortify Rights said.

    Muhib Ullah, a Rohingya Muslim leader who was killed by suspected militants in the refugee camps in September 2021, helps a computer operator at his office in the Kutupalong camp in Ukhia, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, April 21, 2018.
    Muhib Ullah, a Rohingya Muslim leader who was killed by suspected militants in the refugee camps in September 2021, helps a computer operator at his office in the Kutupalong camp in Ukhia, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, April 21, 2018.
    (MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/Reuters)

    Why would Rohingya militants strike fear among their own community of refugees who fled decades of persecution and terror in their homeland in Myanmar?

    “[The] militant groups intimidate, threaten, and harass Rohingya refugees to forcibly recruit new members, prevent them from reporting abuses to the authorities, and gain political control of the camps,” the report said.

    “Militants have also abducted Rohingya refugees for refusing to join or collaborate with them and for opposing militant groups in the camps,” Fortify Rights said, noting that the militants use abductions and torture to extort money for their activities.

    In 2022, refugees told Radio Free Asia affiliate BenarNews that ARSA was also against the repatriation of the Rohingya to Myanmar, but they did not elaborate on the reason.

    ARSA and RSO both have said they are fighting to liberate the Rohingya people in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State from junta-aligned military forces and the Arakan Army, an armed separatist group.

    Rakhine is where most of the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority community lives.

    RELATED STORIES

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    However, Fortify Rights said, RSO had been collaborating since last year with the Burmese junta against the Arakan Army rebels.

    The junta comprises the same security forces whose brutal 2017 crackdown led to some 740,000 Rohingya fleeing across the border to Bangladesh and now staying in camps in Cox’s Bazar in the southeastern part of the country. The junta launched the offensive in response to coordinated attacks by ARSA rebels in Rakhine.

    “While barely mentioning the Myanmar military junta,” ARSA’s leader, in a May 2024 video, focused on combatting the Arakan Army, which wants to “liberate” the state of Rakhine from the army, Fortify Rights said.

    Comprising mainly Rakhine Buddhists, the Arakan Army claimed it respects the rights of Rohingya, but experts say they carried out mass arson attacks on Rohingya villages last year.

    After the military toppled an elected government in Myanmar in 2021, the country descended into a civil war with junta security forces battling a variety of armed ethnic groups.

    ARSA chief arrested

    ARSA and RSO, though, continue to publicly deny responsibility for any wrongdoing, said the report.

    Attaullah Abu Ammar Jununi, then commander-in-chief of ARSA, said in 2017 that “atrocity, violence, and injustice against any innocent civilians is not in [our] principles or policy,” the NGO said.

    ARSA had also denied responsibility for specific incidents of violence in the Bangladesh refugee camps, including the killings of camp leaders and a prominent community leader, Muhib Ullah, whose assassination in September 2021 caused outrage outside Bangladesh as well.

    But Bangladesh authorities, who after years of denying ARSA’s presence in the camps finally admitted in June 2022 that Muhib Ullah’s killing had been ordered by ARSA’s Ataullah.

    And Bangladesh police on Tuesday said that he and other accomplices had been arrested the previous evening in a town near Dhaka. They had been conducting secret meetings to plan “sabotage and criminal activities,” police said.

    The arrested were found in possession of around US$175,000 and some steel weapons.

    Of 29 people accused of links to Muhib Ullah’s killing, 18 accused have been arrested so far, while 11 others are absconding, police told BenarNews on Tuesday.

    A view of the Balukhali camp for Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh Dec. 20, 2017.
    A view of the Balukhali camp for Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh Dec. 20, 2017.
    (Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters)

    Murder and a slew of other criminal activities were common occurrences in the camps where nearly 1 million refugees are sheltering, some Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar told BenarNews.

    Muhammed Jubair, acting president of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, said several armed groups were involved in the crimes.

    “Various crimes, including murder, are being committed in the camps,” he said.

    “It is difficult to say whether the crimes that occur are war crimes or not.”

    A former ARSA member told Fortify Rights in November 2023 that the group didn’t work “according to humanitarian principles” for the community.

    One especially brutal incident is detailed in the report.

    A 23-year-old Rohingya man was abducted, tortured, dismembered, and left to die in the refugee camps – but he survived. He spoke to Fortify Rights about what happened to him.

    “[T]hey cut off my leg first. I was able to hear the sound that they were cutting off the bones of my leg with a big knife,” he told Fortify Rights.

    [‘They] took half an hour to cut me. My arm was cut just above my elbows.”

    BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shailaja Neelakantan and Zia Chowdhury for BenarNews.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Drug war victims’ families celebrate Duterte’s arrest, vow to keep fighting

    By Jodesz Gavilan in Manila

    Paolo* was just 15 years old when he witnessed the Philippine National Police (PNP) mercilessly kill his father in 2016.

    Nearly nine years later, the scales are shifting as Rodrigo Duterte, the man who unleashed death upon his family and thousands of others, now faces the weight of justice before the International Criminal Court (ICC).

    “Finally, naaresto din, [pero] dapat isama si [Senator Ronald dela Rosa], dapat silang panagutin sa dami ng pamilyang inulila nila. (Finally, he’s arrested but Dela Rosa should’ve been with him, they should be held accountable for how many families they left in mourning),” he said.

    TIMELINE: The International Criminal Court and Duterte’s bloody war on drugs
    TIMELINE: The International Criminal Court and Duterte’s bloody war on drugs

    Paolo, then a minor, was also accosted and tortured by Caloocan police — from the same city police who would kill 17-year-old Kian delos Santos less than a year later.

    He was threatened not to do anything else or else end up like his father. Paolo carried the threats and the fear over the years, even as he hoped for justice.

    This hanging on for hope in the face of devastation was not for nothing.

    Duterte was arrested today by Philippine authorities following the issue of a warrant by the ICC in relation to crimes against humanity committed during his violent war on drugs.

    The ICC has been investigating the killings under Duterte’s flagship campaign, which led to at least 6252 deaths in police operations alone by May 2022. The number reached between 27,000 to 30,000, including those killed vigilante-style.

    The Presidential Communications Office said that the government received from the Interpol an official copy of a warrant of arrest.

    Duterte was presented by the Philippine government’s Prosecutor-General with the ICC notification of an arrest over crimes against humanity upon his arrival from Hong Kong on this morning.

    Slow but sure step to justice
    Paolo is not the only one rejoicing over Duterte’s arrest. Many families, including those from drug war hot spot Caloocan City, see this as the long-awaited step toward the justice they have been denied for years.

    When the news broke, Ana* was overcome with joy and thanked God for giving families the strength and unwavering faith to keep fighting for justice. She knew the weight of loss all too well.

    In 2017, police stormed into their home in Caloocan City and brutally killed her husband and father-in-law in a single night.

    Ana, who was five months pregnant at that time, was caught in the violence and was hit by a stray bullet. She and other victims have since been supported by the In Defence of Human Rights and Dignity Movement.

    “Sa wakas, unti-unti nang nakakamit ang hustisya para sa lahat ng biktima (At last, justice is slowly being achieved for all the victims),” she recalled thinking when she read that Duterte had been arrested.

    But Ana is wishing for more than just imprisonment for Duterte, even as she welcomed the long-awaited accountability from the former president and his allies.

    “Sana din ay aminin niya lahat ng kamalian at humingi siya ng kapatawaran sa lahat ng tao na biktima para matahimik din ang mga kaluluwa ng mga namatay (I hope he also admits to all his wrongdoings and asks for forgiveness from every victim, so that the souls of those who were killed may finally find peace),” she said.

    Brutality they endured
    For the families, the ICC’s move and the government’s action are an acknowledgment of the brutality they endured. The latest development is also a validation of their grief and provides a glimmer of hope that accountability is finally within reach. After years of being silenced and dismissed, they see this moment as the start of a reckoning they feared would never come.

    Celina, whose husband was shot dead in a drug war operation, feels overwhelming joy but is wary that the arrest is just part of a long process at the ICC.

    “Ang sabi nga po, mahaba-habang laban ito kaya hindi po sa pag-aresto natatapos ito, bagkus ito ay simula pa lamang ng aming mga laban [at] naniniwala kami at aasa sa kakayahan at suporta na ibinibigay sa amin ng ICC [na] sa huli, mananagot ang dapat managot, maparusahan ang may mga sala,” she said.

    (As they say, this is a long battle, so it does not end with the arrest. Rather, this is only the beginning of our fight. We believe in and will rely on the ICC’s capability and support, knowing that in the end, those who must be held accountable will face justice, and the guilty will be punished.)

    ‘Duterte should feel our pain’
    The wounds left behind by the drug war killings remain deep. The families’ losses are irreversible, yes, but they see this arrest as a long-awaited step toward the justice they have fought for years to achieve.

    It is a stark contrast to the reality they have lived following the deaths of their loved ones. They were constantly under threat from the police who pulled the trigger. Many families had to flee to faraway places, leaving behind their own communities and source of livelihood.

    “Nakakaiyak ako, hindi ko alam ang dapat kong maramdaman na sa ilang taon naming ipinaglalaban ay nakamit din namin ang hustisyang aming minimithi (I’m in tears — I don’t know what to feel. After years of fighting, we have finally achieved the justice we have long been yearning for),“ said Betty, whose 44-year-old son and 22-year-old grandson were killed under Duterte’s drug war.

    For Jane Lee, the arrest only underscores the glaring disparity between the powerful and the powerless.

    “Mabuti pa siya, inaresto ng mga kapulisan. Ang aming mga kaanak, pinatay agad,” she said. “Napakalaki ng pagkakaiba sa pagitan ng makapangyarihan at ordinaryong taong tulad namin.”

    (At least he was arrested by the police. Our loved ones were killed on the spot. The difference between the powerful and ordinary people like us is enormous.)

    Lee’s husband, Michael, was gunned down by unidentified men in May 2017, leaving her to raise their three children alone. Since then, she has volunteered for Rise Up for Life and for Rights, a group composed mostly of widows and mothers who remain steadfast in demanding justice for drug war victims.

    Collective rage
    Families from Rise Up in Cebu also voiced their collective rage against Duterte who ordered killings from the presidential pulpit for six years. They hope that Duterte will feel the same pain they felt when their loved ones were forcibly taken away from them.

    This afternoon, Duterte condemned the alleged violation of due process following his arrest. His allies are also echoing this messaging, calling the arrest unlawful.

    His longtime aide, Senator Bong Go, Go, tried to access Duterte in Villamor Air Base, asking the guards to let him deliver pizza since they hadn’t eaten yet.

    “Katiting lang iyan sa ginawa mo sa amin na sinira mo ang aming buhay at hanapbuhay dahil sa iyong pekeng war on drugs,” the families of drug war victims in Cebu said. “Wala kang karapatan na kumuha ng buhay ng iba [kasi] Diyos lang may karapatan kaya sa ginawa mo, maniningil ang taumbayan lalo na kaming mga pamilya ng mga naging biktima.”

    (That is nothing compared to what you did to us. You destroyed our lives and livelihood because of your fake war on drugs. You have no right to take another person’s life; only God has that right. Because of what you have done, the people will demand justice, especially we, the families of the victims.)

    There is still no clear information on what comes next, whether Duterte will be immediately transferred to the International Criminal Court headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands, or if legal battles will delay the process.

    But Mila*, whose 17-year-old nephew was killed by police in Quezon City in 2018, hopes for one thing if the former president finds himself in a detention cell soon: “Sana huwag na siya lumaya (I hope he is never set free).” 

    Republished from Rappler with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ‘Here you will die’: detainees speak of executions, starvation and beatings at hands of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces

    Haunting accounts of torture in newly found detention centre lead to calls for an investigation into what experts say could be among the worst atrocities of Sudan’s civil war

    Lying between the makeshift graves is a mattress, a large bloodstain visible in the midday sun. A name is scrawled in Arabic on its ragged fabric: Mohammed Adam.

    Who was Adam? Had he ended up here, in a bleak corner of a remote military installation in Sudan’s Khartoum state? Had his body been stretchered on the mattress from the detention centre nearby and dumped into one of hundreds of unmarked graves?

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Profile in Persecution: Abbas Muslem AbdulHusain Juma

    Abbas Muslem AbdulHusain Juma was an 18-year-old school student when Bahraini authorities brutally arrested him on 26 August 2024 without a warrant while he was on his way to his grandfather’s house. During his detention, he has endured torture, denial of family visits, deprivation of lawyer access, unfair trials, and medical neglect. He is currently held in the young convicts section of the Dry Dock Prison, serving a two-year sentence while awaiting trial for other pending cases.

    On 26 August 2024, at 8:00 P.M., Abbas was heading to his grandfather’s house in AlMaqsha with his friends when a civilian car stopped. Several masked plainclothes officers emerged and, without warning, assaulted them. They struck Abbas on the body, head, and face, shattering his eyeglasses. The officers forcibly arrested all of them, took them into the car, and continued beating them without presenting any arrest warrant or stating any reason for the arrest or assault. The beatings persisted inside the vehicle as they were transported to the Budaiya Police Station.

    After Abbas’ arrest, local residents informed his family about his and his friends’ detention. The family contacted several police stations, but none confirmed his whereabouts. On 27 August 2024, at 1:00 A.M., Abbas was allowed to call his family for the first time, stating that he had been arrested without knowing the charges or reasons for his detention. During the call, he was not permitted to disclose his location. Meanwhile, the families of his friends went to the Budaiya Police Station to inquire about their sons and learned that they were being held there with Abbas.

    At Budaiya Police Station, Abbas was interrogated without legal representation on charges of alleged participation in an illegal assembly and committing arson on 24 August 2024. He remained at the station for over two weeks, during which officers repeatedly struck his face and head, splitting open his forehead. They also yelled at him, threatened him, and pressured him to confess or incriminate his friends. Initially, Abbas resisted and denied all accusations, but after days of abuse, he eventually confessed to all charges under coercion, fearing further torture. Following his interrogation, officers transferred him to Roundabout 17 Police Station for a few hours, then to the Public Prosecution Office (PPO), and finally to Dry Dock Prison. While held at Dry Dock, he was repeatedly taken back and forth to the PPO for a month, forced to sign confessions for new cases before being returned to detention. Throughout the entire interrogation period, his family was not allowed to visit him.

    On 26 December 2024, the PPO charged Abbas and his friends with 1) arson and 2) illegal assembly, both allegedly committed on 24 August 2024.

    Abbas was not brought before a judge within 48 hours of his arrest and was denied legal representation during both interrogation and trial. He was not given adequate time or facilities to prepare for his defense, nor was he able to present evidence or challenge the charges against him, which were ambiguous and made it difficult for him to defend himself. His family could not financially afford a lawyer, and Abbas remains uncertain whether a court-appointed lawyer represented him at trial. Additionally, his false confessions, extracted under torture, were used as evidence against him.  On 13 January 2025, after nearly five months in pre-trial detention, Abbas and two other minors—15-year-old Ali Husain Matrook Abdulla and 15-year-old AbdulAziz Husain AlHammadi—were convicted of 1) illegal assembly and 2) arson, receiving six-month prison sentences. On 11 February 2025, the High Criminal Court sentenced Abbas and the same group of friends to an additional one-year prison term in a separate case related to 3) burning tires. After the hearing, Abbas was shocked to learn that the number of cases against him had risen to seven. On 2 March 2025, the court sentenced Abbas and the same group of friends to an additional six months in prison for another 4) illegal assembly case, bringing his total sentence to two years. He is still awaiting trial on four more charges..

    Throughout his detention, Abbas’s family was denied visitation. On 21 January 2025, five months after his arrest, they were finally allowed to see him—for the first and only time. The visit coincided with a court session, and Abbas chose to miss the hearing just to see his family. During the visit, they noticed a cut on his forehead and significant weight loss in his face. When they asked about the injury, he appeared fearful and downplayed it, claiming it wasn’t serious and might have been from a fall. However, he eventually admitted—hesitantly and with evident fear—that he had been beaten. He also told them he needed new eyeglasses, as his had been completely broken.

    Abbas’s warrantless arrest, torture, denial of family visits, denial of legal counsel, unfair trials, and medical neglect constitute clear violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, all of which Bahrain is a party to.

    Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on the Bahraini authorities to uphold their human rights obligations by immediately and unconditionally releasing Abbas. ADHRB further urges the government to investigate allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture, denial of family visits, denial of legal counsel, and medical negligence, ensuring that perpetrators are held accountable and that Abbas is compensated for the violations he endured. At the very least, ADHRB advocates for a fair retrial for Abbas under the Bahraini Restorative Justice Law for Children and in accordance with international legal standards, leading to his release. ADHRB also calls on authorities to provide Abbas with new eyeglasses and proper medical care for injuries sustained from torture and holds them accountable for any deterioration in his health.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Abbas Muslem AbdulHusain Juma appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • Lawsuit Alleges Trump’s Guantánamo Transfers Aim to “Instill Fear” in Immigrants

    The Trump administration transfers of immigrant detainees from mainland jails to the notorious Guantánamo Bay offshore naval base is part of a larger effort to generate headlines and “instill fear in the immigrant population,” all while wasting government resources, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court by civil rights groups this week. The transfers to Guantánamo Bay are part of an…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Approves $3B in Arms to Israel as Freed Palestinians Recount Torture

    As Palestinians released from Israeli imprisonment recount torture and other abuse suffered at the hands of their former captors, the Trump administration on Friday approved a new $3 billion weapons package for Israel. The new package, reported by Zeteo’s Prem Thakker, includes nearly $2.716 billion worth of bombs and weapons guidance kits, as well as $295 million in bulldozers.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Palestine asks ICJ for advisory opinion on illegal occupier Israel’s obligations

    Asia Pacific Report

    The State of Palestine has submitted a written plea to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) asking it for an advisory opinion regarding Israel’s obligations not to obstruct humanitarian and development assistance in the territories it occupies, Al Jazeera reports.

    In the submission, Palestinian officials affirmed the responsibility of Israel, as an occupying power, to not obstruct the work of the UN, international organisations, and third states so they can provide essential services, humanitarian aid, and development assistance to the Palestinian people.

    Many states, as well as international groups, have submitted written pleas to the ICJ ahead of oral proceedings set to start next month.

    Last July, the ICJ issued a historic advisory opinion determining Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and should come to an end “as rapidly as possible”.

    Widespread ‘torture’ of Gaza medics in Israeli custody
    In a separate report, the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights accused the Israeli military of detaining more than 250 medical personnel and support staff since the beginning of the war on Gaza in October 2023.

    More than 180 remained in detention without a clear indication of when or if they would be released, the physicians’ report said.

    “Detainees endure physical, psychological and sexual abuse as well as starvation and medical neglect amounting to torture,” the report said, denouncing a “deeply ingrained policy”.

    Healthcare workers were beaten, threatened, and forced to sign documents in Hebrew during their detention, according to the report based on 20 testimonies collected in prison.

    “Medical personnel were primarily questioned about the Israeli hostages, tunnels, hospital structures and Hamas’s activity,” it said.

    “They were rarely asked questions linking them to any criminal activity, nor were they presented with substantive charges.”

    New Zealand protesters calling for the continuation of the Gaza ceasefire and for peace and justice in Palestine in a march along the Auckland waterfront
    New Zealand protesters calling for the continuation of the Gaza ceasefire and for peace and justice in Palestine in a march along the Auckland waterfront today. Image: Asia Pacific Report

    Where does Trump stand on the Gaza ceasefire?
    With phase one of the ceasefire due to end today and negotiations barely started on phase two, serious fears are being raised over  the viability of the ceasefire.

    President Donald Trump took credit for the truce that his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff helped push across the finish line after a year of negotiations led by the Biden administration, Egypt and Qatar, reports Al Jazeera.

    Advocate Maher Nazzal at today's New Zealand rally for Gaza in Auckland
    Advocate Maher Nazzal at today’s New Zealand rally for Gaza in Auckland . . . he was elected co-leader of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa last weekend. Image: Asia Pacific Report

    However, Trump has since sent mixed signals about the deal.

    Earlier last month, he set a firm deadline for Hamas to release all the captives, warning “all hell is going to break out” if it didn’t.

    But he said it was ultimately up to Israel, and the deadline came and went.

    Trump sowed further confusion by proposing that Gaza’s population of about 2.3 million be relocated to other countries and for the US to take over the territory and develop it.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the idea, but it was universally rejected by Palestinians and Arab countries, including close US allies. Human rights groups said it could violate international law.

    Trump stood by the plan in a Fox News interview over the weekend but said he was “not forcing it”.


    ‘Finally’ an effort to hold the US accountable, says Al-Haq director
    Palestinian human rights activist Shawan Jabarin has welcomed a plea by the US-based rights group DAWN for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Joe Biden and senior US officials for aiding Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

    In a video posted by DAWN, Jabarin, director of the Palestinian rights group Al-Haq, said the effort was long overdue.

    “For decades we have called on the international community to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law, but time and again, the US has used its power and influence to block that accountability, to shield Israel from consequences and to ensure that it can continue its crimes with impunity,” Jabarin said.

    “Now, finally, we see an effort to hold not just Israeli officials accountable but also those who have made these crimes possible: US officials who have armed, financed, and politically defended Israeli atrocities.”

    A father piggybacks his sleepy child during the New Zealand solidarity protest for Palestine in Auckland's Viaduct
    A father piggybacks his sleepy child during the New Zealand solidarity protest for Palestine in Auckland’s Viaduct today. Image: Asia Pacific Report

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Remembering Is Not Enough

    I’m Still Here defies the far right’s attempts to redeem Brazil’s military dictatorship. But it suggests a tidier closure to the regime’s disappearances than many real families have experienced.

    This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.

  • Over 160 Gaza Health Workers Remain Trapped In Israeli Torture Camps

    At least 160 healthcare workers from Gaza, including more than 20 doctors, are believed to still be inside Israeli detention facilities where torture and rape are routine, The Guardian reported on 25 February.

    According to Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW), a Palestinian medical NGO, 162 medical staff remain in Israeli detention, including some of Gaza’s most senior physicians, while 24 others remain missing after being abducted by Israeli forces from hospitals during the war. Another 179 were previously detained but have been released.

    The post Over 160 Gaza Health Workers Remain Trapped In Israeli Torture Camps appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘They forced me to stand for hours in the cold, arms raised and shackled’: eight Gaza doctors on their Israeli prison ordeal

    Senior doctors and surgeons describe the torture, starvation, humiliation and denial of medical care they endured while being held without charge

    Many days I was tied to a chair in the interrogation room for maybe 15 hours. I was not allowed to sleep or eat or drink. They tied my arms to the chair very painfully and when they were beating me they would put their hands or legs on my chest to bend my back.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Looking towards 2025: Blog post by OMCT Secretary General Gerald Staberock

    In this interview, OMCT Secretary General Gerald Staberock shares his vision for 2025 and key priorities in the fight against torture. From the launch of the Global Torture Index to the SOS Defenders platform, he highlights the initiatives that will shape the movement and strengthen global human rights efforts, including the Global Week on Torture—an event not to be missed.

    His message for 2025 is clear: “resilience and unity, not despair.”

    What is your vision for 2025, and what priorities should we focus on to maximize our impact on human rights?

    In my vision, 2025 is the year in which we rise to the challenge and stand up in the anti-torture movement and uphold the absolute prohibition of torture. Today, in an increasingly dangerous world where states are turning away from human rights, fostering division and weakening protections, and some questioning universal norms altogether, the message must be resilience and unity, not despair. It is essential to protect all victims of torture and to defend the universality of human rights, which is under threat.

    I am convinced that our SOS Torture Network must serve as an anchor for human rights and universality. As a movement, we stand united—to protect those at risk, to support our fellow human rights defenders under threat, and to ensure that the absolute prohibition of torture remains intact.

    What impact do you hope the launch of the Global Torture Index will have?

    The Global Index on Torture is the new flagship program of OMCT, with its launch anticipated in June 2025. I think it is the tool we have been lacking for years, and a tool all actors working against torture can benefit from. It combines reliable data with often-overlooked narratives to make the hidden reality of torture visible. This index will allow us to measure its scope, its impact on society, and advocate for political and legal reforms. It will help identify risks and develop effective anti-torture strategies. This index is not only an OMCT tool but a collective resource to support the efforts of network members towards concrete reforms and the prevention of torture.

    Why is the Global Week on Torture important and what can people expect?

    Four years ago, we held the first ever Global Week Against Torture, and we saw the power and energy that such a week can create. Many of us, especially those of our members working in very complicated dire situation, often feel alone. It offers a unique opportunity to share experiences, best practices and to learn from each other and to stand in solidarity across countries and regions. The Global Week all makes us feel and understand that we are united in a struggle and reflect that the real force of the OMCT is in its SOS Torture Network.

    How will the SOS Defenders platform and the SOS Database help serve human rights defenders?

    One of the most important achievements in 2024 has been the launch of the SOS Defenders platform. The platform gives a face to more than 400 human rights defenders that are currently imprisoned because they stood up for human rights. We don’t forget them. We want to demonstrate to governments that the detention of these defenders is an attack on democracy and freedom, and we need to make states who support human rights understand that this is the moment to step up in their actions. OMCT, along with its SOS Torture Network must raise the alarm bells and act to protect from torture and ill-treatment in detention.

    https://www.omct.org/en/resources/blog/%C3%A0-lhorizon-2025-le-secr%C3%A9taire-g%C3%A9n%C3%A9ral-de-lomct-sur-lavenir-des-droits-de-lhomme

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • ‘No rules’: Gaza’s doctors say they were tortured, beaten and humiliated in Israeli detention

    Healthcare workers are protected under international law yet hundreds were detained during the war. Now, some of Gaza’s most senior doctors have spoken of the violence and abuse they say they faced

    Dr Issam Abu Ajwa was in the middle of performing emergency surgery on a patient with a severe abdominal injury at al-Ahli Arab hospital in central Gaza when the soldiers came for him.

    “I asked them what they were doing coming into the operating theatre,” he says. “One of the soldiers pointed at me and said: ‘Are you Dr Issam Abu Ajwa?’ I said: ‘Yes, that’s me.’ And then the beating began.”

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Myanmar scam center survivors recall torture and coercion | Radio Free Asia (RFA)


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Myanmar scam center survivors recall torture and coercion | Radio Free Asia (RFA)


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Profile in Persecution: AbdulAziz Husain AlHammadi

    15-year-old minor and school student AbdulAziz Husain AlHammadi was arrested by Bahraini authorities on 20 October 2024 from his home without a warrant. During his detention, he endured enforced disappearance, torture, denial of family contact and visits, denial of lawyer access, unfair trial, malnutrition, medical neglect, and deprivation of his right to education. He is currently held in the Juvenile section of the Dry Dock Detention Center, serving a one-year, six-month sentence while awaiting trial for other pending cases.

    On 20 October 2024, at 11:50 P.M., AbdulAziz was asleep at home when plainclothes officers wearing police-emblem vests knocked on the door, frightening his mother and ordering her to wake him. They arrested him without presenting an arrest warrant or providing any reason for his arrest. He was then taken to a dark area behind Maqaba Police Station, where officers beat him on the head before transferring him that night to the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID), where he was further tortured and interrogated. 

    The following day, 21 October 2024, authorities issued a summons for him despite already holding him in custody. That day, he was allowed to call his family for the first time, informing them he was being interrogated over an Instagram post. However, the call was cut off before he could reveal his location. He then disappeared for 48 hours. During this time, his mother contacted authorities to find him, but they falsely claimed he was at Dry Dock Detention Center while he was actually being held at the CID, preventing her from locating him. 

    At the CID, AbdulAziz was interrogated without legal representation or a guardian present, despite being a minor. He was left in a cold, dark room for 48 hours, blindfolded, handcuffed, and seated on a chair. Officers repeatedly struck his head, leaving a visible wound. When his blindfold was removed, an investigator ordered him to keep his eyes down and focus on a tablet displaying photos of individuals, demanding that he identify them. The moment AbdulAziz looked up, the investigator struck him hard on the head and slapped him. Despite repeated beatings and slaps, he could not identify the persons in the images, as he had never seen them before. The physical abuse persisted until he was forced to falsely claim recognition and confess to charges just to stop the beatings. Officers also shouted politically motivated insults at him.

    After his interrogation at the CID, AbdulAziz was transferred to Roundabout 17 Police Station on 23 October 2024 and later that same day to the Public Prosecution Office (PPO). During the transfer, he learned that, in addition to charges of 1) inciting hatred against the regime and 2) misusing telecommunications related to the Instagram post, new charges had been added, including 3) assault on military personnel and 4) possession of usable and explosive devices. At the PPO, while his lawyer was present, authorities barred her from speaking with or defending him, claiming he had not personally authorized her—despite her authorization from his mother. There, AbdulAziz denied all charges and refused to sign pre-written confessions, arguing that no evidence, such as fingerprints or photographs, linked him to the accusations. Nevertheless, the prosecutor ordered his detention, and he was transferred to Dry Dock Detention Center.

    On 10 December 2024, a court session was held for AbdulAziz regarding the misuse of telecommunication services case, and the court ordered his release. The family’s lawyer informed them of the verdict, stating they would receive a call to pick him up. At 5:00 P.M. that day, AbdulAziz called his mother from the CID, telling her that although he had been granted release, authorities refused to free him due to three other pending cases. He also informed her that he was being transferred to Budaiya Police Station in the Northern Governorate. When his mother arrived, officers initially denied her access to him, but a senior officer eventually allowed the visit, warning her not to cause problems. Seeing her son in a dire state—barefoot, in torn clothes, with bruised wrists from the handcuffs—she broke down in tears, screamed in distress, and collapsed. Shortly after, she was informed he would be transferred to Roundabout 17 Police Station. She objected, arguing that the facility housed adult detainees and insisted he be sent to Dry Dock Detention Center instead. Her demand was met after she briefly left to bring him clothes and shoes.

    AbdulAziz was not brought before a judge within 24 hours of his arrest, was denied legal representation during interrogation, and was not given adequate time or facilities to prepare for his defense. His false confessions, extracted under torture, were used as evidence against him.  On 13 January 2025, after nearly three months of pre-trial detention, AbdulAziz and two other minors—15-year-old Ali Husain Matrook Abdulla and 17-year-old Abbas Muslim Juma—were convicted of 1) illegal assembly and 2) arson, receiving six-month prison sentences. AbdulAziz was shocked by the verdict, as no evidence linked him to the crime, and the trial relied solely on statements from other minors convicted in the same case. He informed the judge that the alleged illegal gathering on 24 August 2024 took place in his hometown, AlMaqsha; however, it was impossible for him to have participated, as he and his family were residing in Hamad town at the time. Despite this, the court disregarded his evidence and proceeded with the conviction. AbdulAziz appealed the sentence, and an appeal session was scheduled for 3 March 2025. On 11 February 2025, he was convicted of 3) burning tires and sentenced to an additional year in prison, bringing his total sentence to one year and six months. He is also awaiting trial for additional charges, including 4) assault on security forces, 5) possession of usable and explosive devices, and 6) an unknown charge. He is scheduled to stand trial for the assault on security forces charge on 24 February 2025.

    Throughout his detention, AbdulAziz was denied family visits. After his sentencing, his family was allowed to visit him for the first time on 26 January 2025. His mother noticed he looked pale and extremely fatigued. When she asked about his condition, he attributed it to severe sleep deprivation caused by intense fear at night and persistent frightening noises, as well as malnutrition due to the poor quality of the food provided. His detention has also caused him to miss an entire school year, as the Dry Dock Detention Center administration deprived him of his right to education. Additionally, he suffers from jaw problems and requires a specific device, but authorities refused to allow his family to provide it. His family filed two complaints with the Ombudsman and the National Institution for Human Rights (NIHR) regarding the torture he endured during interrogations and his deprivation of education since his arrest,  but they have received no response.

    AbdulAziz’s warrantless arrest as a minor, enforced disappearance, torture, denial of family contact, visits, denial of legal counsel, unfair trial, malnutrition, medical neglect, and deprivation of education constitute clear violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, all of which Bahrain is a party to.

    Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on the Bahraini authorities to uphold their human rights obligations by immediately and unconditionally releasing AbdulAziz. ADHRB further urges the government to investigate allegations of arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture, denial of family contact and visits, denial of legal counsel, malnutrition, medical negligence, and deprivation of the right to education, ensuring that perpetrators are held accountable and that AbdulAziz is compensated for the violations he endured. At the very least, ADHRB advocates for a fair retrial for AbdulAziz under the Bahraini Restorative Justice Law for Children and in accordance with international legal standards, leading to his release. ADHRB also calls on authorities to allow AbdulAziz to resume his education, provide the necessary support for him to complete his studies, ensure he receives proper medical care—including the device needed for his jaw condition—and improve the quality of his food.

    The post Profile in Persecution: AbdulAziz Husain AlHammadi appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya Has Been Tortured And Denied Care In Prison

    After multiple postponements by the Israeli occupation, Kamal Adwan Hospital director Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was finally allowed to see a lawyer. The visit confirmed suspicions about the torture he has endured since his arbitrary imprisonment at the end of December 2024. According to reports from Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Dr. Abu Safiya suffered the same methods of torture inflicted by Israeli forces on all Palestinian prisoners, including having his hands tightly shackled and being forced to kneel and sit on gravel for hours.

    The post Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya Has Been Tortured And Denied Care In Prison appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Hamas, PIJ slam Israel’s ‘barbaric’ raid on Palestinians at Ofer Prison

    Asia Pacific Report

    Two Palestinian resistance groups have condemned “the brutal assault” on prisoners at Ofer Prison, saying it was “barbaric criminal behaviour that reflects the fascist and terrorist nature of” Israel.

    In the joint statement, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) called the attack a “miserable attempt” by Israel “to restore its shattered prestige”, reports Al Jazeera.

    They called on the world to expose “these inhuman crimes against the prisoners”, which “blatantly violate all international conventions and norms”.

    The statement called on the international community to intervene to protect the “prisoners, stop criminal violations against them, document them and work to hold the criminal occupation leaders accountable”.

    The statement came after Palestinian authorities said Israeli forces had raided a section of Ofer Prison, west of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, and assaulted detainees.

    “Prisoners were beaten and sprayed with gas,” the Palestinian Prisoners Media Office said.

    Persistent serious allegations of torture and abuse of Palestinian prisoners — many who have not been charged or are held on administrative detention — and beatings right up until the release of detainees under the ceasefire have been made over all six exchange events so far.

    Medical director severely tortured
    Last week, lawyers representing Kamal Adwan Hospital’s medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya met him for the first time since he was detained by Israeli forces in north Gaza last December 27.

    He told them he was severely tortured with electric shocks and was being denied needed medication.


    Lawyer spells out torture allegations over Israeli detention of doctor.  Video: Al Jazeera

    Samir Al-Mana’ama, a lawyer with the Al Mazan Center for Human Rights, described his brutal torture in a failed attempt to “extract a confession” from him in an interview with Al Jazeera.

    Al-Mana’ama said Dr Abu Safiya suffered from “an enlarged heart muscle and from high blood pressure” and was beaten up and refused treatment for the heart condition.

    Transferred to Ofter Prison on January 9, he was held in solitary confinement for 25 days and interrogated nonstop by the Israeli army, Israeli intelligence and police, the lawyer added.

    There was “no legal justification” for Abu Safia’s arrest and no evidence against him, the lawyer said.

    Since the interview, Israeli authorities said he was being held under an “unlawful combatant” law — despite his status as a civilian doctor — stripping him of any rights as a detainee.

    Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in Jordan, said the doctor was one of hundreds of medical workers taken from Gaza by Israeli forces to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp and other Israeli military prisons.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Profile in Persecution: Mohammed Isa Khatam

    Mohammed Isa Khatam was a 16-year-old minor and high school student when Bahraini authorities warrantlessly arrested him on 5 August 2024, just three days before his 17th birthday. During his detention, he has endured enforced disappearance, torture, denial of lawyer and guardian access during interrogations, unfair questioning, deprivation of family visits and contact, denial of education, prohibition of practicing religious rituals, and reprisals. Heartbreakingly, he was denied the chance to bid farewell to his mother, who passed away during his detention. He has been held in the Juvenile section of the Dry Dock Detention Center for six months, awaiting trial.

    On 5 August 2024, Mohammed and his friends, Ali Salman Marhoon and Husain Saleh AlBarri, went to Sitra Police Station after receiving a phone call from their detained friend, Sadiq Hobail, requesting them to deliver his mobile phone. Upon arrival, the three minors were unexpectedly arrested and accused of multiple charges, including unlawful assembly, rioting, burning tires, and posting pictures. The officers presented no arrest warrants. Mohammed was then transferred from the Sitra Police Station to the Qudaibiya Police Station. When Mohammed failed to return home, his family grew worried and began searching for him by contacting his friends and their families. They learned he had gone to the Sitra Police Station and rushed there to inquire, but officials denied he was being held. 

    On 6 August 2024, Mohammed was interrogated at the Qudaibiya Police Station without legal representation or a guardian present, despite being a minor. His family remained unaware of the interrogation due to his enforced disappearance. During questioning, officers subjected Mohammed to psychological abuse, including insults and degrading language. They also attempted to coerce a confession through violent and humiliating methods, which Mohammed chose not to disclose to his family to protect their feelings. Despite the pressure, he consistently denied all charges against him. 

    On 7 August 2024, Mohammed was brought before the Public Prosecution Office (PPO) without legal representation, a guardian, or prior notification to his family. He was also denied adequate time to address the judge and defend himself. The judge read the charges against him, including arson and other accusations unknown to his family, and asked him to confirm or deny them, and then ordered his detention before postponing the session. A social researcher present during the session advised the judge against releasing Mohammed and his friends, claiming that the external environment negatively influences their behavior. Following this session, Mohammed was transferred to the Dry Dock Detention Center. Later that day, at 1:00 A.M., after two days of enforced disappearance, he called his family and informed them he was detained at the Dry Dock Detention Center. He remains at the Dry Dock Detention Center while awaiting trial, with his detention repeatedly extended through investigation sessions conducted via video calls.

    Since his arrest, Bahraini authorities have denied Mohammed’s family the right to visit him at the Dry Dock Detention Center. He has also been deprived of his right to practice religious rituals and continue his education while in detention. On 22 September 2024, his family submitted requests to both the Ombudsman and the National Institution for Human Rights (NIHR), demanding Mohammed’s release and his right to resume his education. While a representative from one of these institutions met with Mohammed, who expressed his desire to continue his formal education, the Ombudsman later informed the family that their request had been dismissed, citing that the matter falls outside its jurisdiction.

    On 10 January 2025, Mohammed’s mother passed away after a long battle with cancer. Despite Bahraini law guaranteeing prisoners the right to attend funerals and mourning ceremonies for immediate family members, Mohammed was denied the chance to bid farewell to his mother or participate in the ceremonies. He had a court session on 12 January 2025, which coincided with the second day of his mother’s mourning ceremonies. Mohammed submitted a request to attend the ceremonies, and the judge approved his release for the remainder of the mourning period, with the condition that he be handed over and returned to the Sitra Police Station. However, the PPO disregarded the judge’s order and failed to carry out the necessary procedures for his release.

    On 20 January 2025, reports revealed that Mohammed, along with his friends Ali Omran, Husain AlBarri, and Ali Salman Marhoon-detained at the Juvenile Detention Center in Building 17 of the Dry Dock Detention Center- had been subjected to punitive retaliatory measures. These included confinement to their cells without family contact or outdoor breaks for up to seven consecutive days and denial of access to purchase basic necessities from the prison canteen, all as punishment for speaking loudly. These harsh measures, effectively isolating Mohammed and his friends, have taken a severe toll on their mental and physical health

    Mohammed’s warrantless arrest as a minor, enforced disappearance, torture, denial of legal counsel and guardian access during interrogations, deprivation of family visits and phone contact, unfair investigation, withholding of his right to education, prohibition from practicing religious rituals, refusal to allow him to bid farewell to his deceased mother, unjust denial of outdoor breaks and access to the prison canteen as retaliation, and prolonged arbitrary pre-trial detention constitute blatant violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the Convention against Torture (CAT), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, to which Bahrain is a party. 

    Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on Bahraini authorities to uphold their human rights obligations by immediately and unconditionally releasing Mohammed. ADHRB further urges the government to investigate allegations of arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture, denial of legal counsel and guardian access during interrogations, unfair investigations, denial of family visits and phone contact, withholding of Mohammed’s right to education, prohibition of religious practice, refusal to allow him to bid farewell to his deceased mother, and acts of reprisal, while ensuring that those responsible are held accountable. ADHRB also demands compensation for the violations Mohammed has endured during detention. At the very least, ADHRB calls for a prompt and fair trial for Mohammed in line with the Bahraini Restorative Justice Law for Children and international legal standards, leading to his release. Additionally, ADHRB urges the Bahraini authorities to permit Mohammed to resume his education, freely practice his religious rituals, and maintain regular family visits and phone calls. Finally, ADHRB calls on the Dry Dock Detention Center’s administration to immediately end all retaliatory measures against Mohammed and his friends, ensuring they are allowed family contact, outdoor breaks, and access to basic necessities through the prison canteen.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Mohammed Isa Khatam appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • নির্যাতন ও বিচারবহির্ভূত হত্যাকাণ্ড বন্ধ করতে হবে, অপরাধীদের বিচারের আওতায় আনতে হবে।

    ২ ফেব্রুয়ারি ২০২৫

    গত ৩১ জানুয়ারি ২০২৫ কুমিল্লায় যৌথ বাহিনীর হাতে আটক হওয়ার পর যুবদল নেতা তৌহিদুল ইসলামকে নির্যাতন করে হত্যা করা হয়েছে বলে জানা যায়। অভিযোগ অনুযায়ী, তাঁর কোমর থেকে পা পর্যন্ত মারাত্মকভাবে পিটিয়ে নির্যাতন করা হয়, যার ফলে কালো ফোলা জখমের চিহ্ন দেখা গেছে বলে দাবি করেন তাঁর ভাই সাদেকুর রহমান। অধিকার এই বিচারবহির্ভূত হত্যার ঘটনায় তীব্র নিন্দা ও প্রতিবাদ জানাচ্ছে।

    বিগত সাড়ে ১৫ বছরে তৎকালীন কর্তৃত্ববাদী সরকারের নির্দেশে আইন প্রয়োগকারী সংস্থার সদস্যরা বিরোধী দল ও মত দমন করতে নির্যাতন এবং তথাকথিত ক্রসফায়ারের নামে হত্যাকাণ্ড চালিয়েছে। ২০২৪ সালের জুলাই মাসে কোটাসংস্কার আন্দোলন দমন করতে শেখ হাসিনা সরকার নির্বিচারে গণহত্যা চালায়, যার বিরুদ্ধে ছাত্র-জনতা অন্যায় ও জুলুমের বিরুদ্ধে রুখে দাঁড়ায়। তবে গণহত্যা চালিয়েও সরকার ক্ষমতা ধরে রাখতে ব্যর্থ হয়, এবং গণবিস্ফোরণের ফলে তাদের পতন ঘটে। ছাত্র-জনতার মূল অনুপ্রেরণা ছিল একটি বৈষম্যহীন সমাজব্যবস্থা গড়ার অঙ্গীকার, যাতে ভবিষ্যতে মানবাধিকার লঙ্ঘনের ঘটনা না ঘটে। এই লক্ষ্যে অন্তর্বর্তীকালীন সরকার ক্ষমতায় আসার পর পুলিশকে জবাবদিহির আওতায় আনতে এবং ক্ষমতাসীন দলের প্রভাবমুক্ত করতে পুলিশ সংস্কার কমিশন গঠন করে। তবে এরপরও আইন প্রয়োগকারী সংস্থার বিরুদ্ধে বিচারবহির্ভূত হত্যার অভিযোগ উঠেছে, যা কোনোভাবেই গ্রহণযোগ্য নয়।

    উল্লেখ্য, ৯ আগস্ট ২০২৪ থেকে ৩১ জানুয়ারি ২০২৫ পর্যন্ত ৮ জন ব্যক্তি আইন প্রয়োগকারী সংস্থা ও যৌথ বাহিনীর হাতে নির্যাতনের শিকার হয়ে নিহত হয়েছেন।

    ১৯৭১ সালে বাংলাদেশ স্বাধীন হওয়ার পর তৎকালীন আওয়ামী লীগ সরকার বিরোধী দল দমন করতে বিচারবহির্ভূত হত্যা শুরু করে। বিপ্লবী বাম রাজনীতির সঙ্গে যুক্ত থাকার কারণে সিরাজ শিকদারসহ কয়েক হাজার তরুণ ও যুবককে জাতীয় রক্ষীবাহিনীর মাধ্যমে হত্যা করা হয়। পরবর্তী সরকারগুলোও এই ধারা অব্যাহত রাখে।

    ৯০-এর গণঅভ্যুত্থানের পর জনগণ আশা করেছিল যে, নির্বাচিত সরকার বিচারবহির্ভূত হত্যার অবসান ঘটাবে এবং দোষীদের বিচারের আওতায় আনবে। কিন্তু বাস্তবে তা ঘটেনি।

    ২০০১ সালে বিএনপি ক্ষমতায় এসে অপারেশন ক্লিনহার্ট চালিয়ে বহু মানুষকে বিচারবহির্ভূতভাবে হত্যা করে। ২০০৪ সালে র‌্যাপিড অ্যাকশন ব্যাটালিয়ন (র‌্যাব) গঠন করা হয়, যার হাতে ব্যাপক নির্যাতন ও ক্রসফায়ারের ঘটনা ঘটে। ২০০১ সালের ১০ অক্টোবর থেকে ২০০৬ সালের ২৮ অক্টোবর পর্যন্ত ১৭০ জন আইনশৃঙ্খলা বাহিনীর হাতে নির্যাতনে নিহত হন বলে অভিযোগ রয়েছে।

    ২০০৭ ও ২০০৮ সালে সেনাসমর্থিত তত্ত্বাবধায়ক সরকারের আমলে ৪৬ জন ব্যক্তি নির্যাতনে নিহত হন।

    ২০০৯ সালে আওয়ামী লীগ সরকার ক্ষমতায় আসার পর বিচারবহির্ভূত হত্যাকাণ্ড অব্যাহত থাকে। অথচ ২০০৯ সালে জাতিসংঘের ইউনিভার্সেল পিরিওডিক রিভিউ (ইউপিআর) তে তৎকালিন পররাষ্ট্রমন্ত্রী দিপু মনি বিচারবহির্ভূত হত্যাকাণ্ডের বিষয়ে সরকার জিরো টলারেন্স দেখাবে বলে জানায়। কিন্তু এরপর থেকে বিচারবহির্ভূত হত্যাকাণ্ড আরো ব্যাপক আকার ধারণ করে। পতিত কর্তৃত্ববাদী আওয়ামী লীগ সরকার ২০১৮ সালের ১৫ মে থেকে দেশব্যাপী মাদকবিরোধী অভিযান চালানোর নামে বিপুল সংখ্যক মানুষকে মূলত ক্রসফায়ার দিয়ে বিচারবহির্ভূতভাবে হত্যা করে। এই সময় নির্যাতনের মাধ্যমেও হত্যার ঘটনাগুলো ঘটতে থাকে। এই সময় বিচারবহির্ভূত  হত্যাকান্ডের পাশাপাশি গুমেরও ঘটনা ঘটতে থাকে। গুম অবস্থা থেকে ফেরত আসা ব্যক্তিরা তাঁদের উপর অমানুষিক নির্যাতনের কথা জানিয়েছেন। এছাড়া অনেক  গুমের শিকার ব্যক্তিদের বিচারবহির্ভূতভাবে হত্যা করা হয় বলে জানা গেছে। ২০০৯ সালের ০৬ জানুয়ারী থেকে  ২০২৪ সালের ০৫ আগস্ট পর্যন্ত আওয়ামী লীগের শাসনামলে  ১৮২ জন ব্যক্তি নির্যাতনের ফলে মারা গেছেন বলে জানা গেছে।

    এই পরিস্থিতিতে নির্যাতনে হত্যাসহ সবধরণের বিচারবহির্ভূত হত্যাকাণ্ড বন্ধ করতে হবে এবং অপরাধীদের দৃষ্টান্তমূলক শাস্তির আওতায় আনতে হবে।

    আইন প্রয়োগকারী সংস্থার দ্বারা কথিত নির্যাতনে মৃত্যুর তথ্য (২০০১-২০২৫)

    সরকার

    সময়কাল

    নির্যাতনে মৃত্যু

    বিএনপি সরকার

    ১০ অক্টোবর ২০০১ – ২৮ অক্টোবর ২০০৬

    ১৭০

    তত্ত্বাবধায়ক সরকার

    ২৯ অক্টোবর ২০০৬ – ০৫ জানুয়ারি ২০০৯

    ৪৬

    আওয়ামী লীগ সরকার

    ০৬ জানুয়ারি ২০০৯ – ০৫ আগস্ট ২০২৪

    ১৮২

    অন্তর্বর্তীকালীন সরকার

    ০৯ আগস্ট ২০২৪ – ৩১ জানুয়ারি ২০২৫

    ৮

    মোট 

    ৪০৬

     

     

     

     

    This post was originally published on News – Odhikar.

  • ‘I watched every video to see my father’s face’: the woman who became the voice of Syria’s missing on why she isn’t giving up hope

    Assad’s notorious prisons may have been opened, but Wafa Mustafa and thousands of others feel abandoned in their struggle to find loved ones

    When insurgents threw open the doors of Aleppo central prison in northern Syria as they overran the city in December, Wafa Mustafa, 34, watched videos of the scenes from exile in Germany in disbelief. Shocked detainees could be seen running into the night as a decades-long dictatorship built on a network of prisons and torture chambers crumbled.

    Mustafa began praying that the insurgents would reach the detention centres in Damascus, where she believed her father, Ali, was being held by the feared intelligence services. He was kidnapped from their home in the Syrian capital more than a decade ago and she has not seen or heard from him since.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Myanmar’s Arakan Army confirms torture, execution of POWs in leaked viral video

    Read RFA coverage of this story in Burmese.

    Ethnic Rakhine rebels on Friday confirmed the torture and execution of two prisoners of war from Myanmar’s military after video clips of the killings went viral online.

    The videos have prompted an NGO to call on the International Criminal Court to launch an investigation into the incident.

    While RFA has obtained several videos of junta troops torturing and killing enemy combatants in the nearly four years since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup d’etat, opposition forces have largely claimed to adhere to the rules of war with regards to the treatment of POWs.

    A leaked two-minute video clip recently generated a buzz on social media in Myanmar that shows around seven men — some of whom are wearing Arakan Army, or AA, uniforms — kicking and beating two shirtless men who are lying on the ground.

    Another video showed their brutal killing.

    On Friday, AA spokesperson Khaing Thu Kha confirmed that the videos showed his group’s soldiers torturing and executing two junta POWs in Rakhine state’s Kyauktaw township on Feb. 7, 2024, during an offensive against Military Operations Command No. 9.

    Speaking at a press conference, he said that the AA soldiers “were unable to control their anger” and committed the crimes in retaliation for junta troops arresting, torturing and killing their family members.

    The AA’s admission came a day after Southeast Asia-based NGO Fortify Rights called on the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, to investigate reports of AA soldiers committing atrocities in Rakhine state, specifically mentioning the two video clips that went viral.

    Sources with knowledge of the incident told RFA Burmese that it occurred in the mountains near Kyauktaw Mountain Pagoda during the February 2024 AA offensive.

    The two junta soldiers were reportedly captured while fleeing from a battalion at Military Operations Command No. 9, said the sources, who spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

    They said that the two men were killed while being taken to a location where other POWs were held, and claimed that the perpetrators included AA soldiers, AA militiamen, and members of the anti-junta People’s Defense Force, or PDF.

    The incident followed a junta artillery barrage into Kyauktaw’s Kan Sauk village that had killed residents, including relatives of the AA soldiers, the sources said.

    They said two men involved in the killing recorded the videos, one of whom shared the clips with residents after returning to Kan Sauk village. A villager sent the clips to a family member working in Malaysia, who posted them to Facebook, where they went viral.

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    Telecommunications and internet access have been cut in Rakhine state since late 2023, when the AA ended a ceasefire that had been in place since the coup, and RFA was unable to independently verify the social media accounts.

    The AA has since gone on to take control of nearly all townships in the state and is now pushing into Myanmar’s heartland.

    Attempts by RFA to contact the AA’s Khaing Thu Kha for comment on the killings went unanswered Friday.

    Calls for accountability

    Ejaz Min Khant, human rights associate at Fortify Rights, told RFA that the torture and execution of civilians or captured enemy soldiers are considered “war crimes.”

    “It is crucial to take action against those involved in extrajudicial killings,” he said. “We welcome [that] the AA has acknowledged this and stated they have taken action.”

    However, according to Fortify Rights, Khaing Thu Kha’s claim that the killings were retaliation for the deaths of AA family members contradicts what can be heard in the video, where the perpetrators said their commander had ordered them to kill the two POWs.

    “If they were ordered to do so, who are their senior officers? What are their ranks? What specific actions have been taken?” Ejaz asked. “This must be clarified transparently.”

    He said his group will urge the AA to cooperate with international judicial bodies to conduct an investigation into the incident and plans to monitor and document the army’s actions to prevent similar human rights violations.

    The torture and executions drew additional condemnation from Salai William Chin, the general secretary of the Chin National Organization/Chin National Defense Force, another ethnic army battling the military in Chin state, in the northwest.

    “It is absolutely unacceptable,” he said, adding that all anti-junta groups must work together to prevent such incidents.

    “In the future, as armed opposition groups throughout the country wage war to capture junta camps and towns under junta control, we have to be mindful that this kind of incident should not occur again when we take POWs,” he said. “It is crucial that senior commanders don’t act like [leaders of] the terrorist military junta.”

    Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.