Surrounded by his family, a necklace of white roses around his neck and a broad smile lighting up his face, Nabil Rajab appeared, free, at his home, in Manama, Tuesday, June 9. Figurehead of the Arab Spring and illustrious Bahraini opponent, 55-year-old human rights activist has benefited from measures "Alternatives" for the three years he remains in prison, said his lawyer, Mohammed Al-Jichi. He was sentenced in 2018 to five years in prison for tweets criticizing the Saudi military intervention in Yemen and denouncing alleged cases of torture in his country.
"We welcome the news of the release of Nabil Rajab"said Aya Majzoub, a Bahrain researcher for the NGO Human Rights Watch. "He should never have been imprisoned, but we are happy that he has finally found his family", she added. Nabil Rajab is the first political prisoner to be released since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which left 29 dead and contaminated more than 15,000 people in the kingdom of 1.5 million people, regularly pinned by NGO for its human rights record. In a press release, the activist's family said that the latter "Suffers from a severe weakening of the immune system, which makes it vulnerable" contamination with the new coronavirus and constitutes "A threat to his life".
Fierce repression
His conviction in 2018 for "Spreading rumors in wartime", "Insult to a foreign country" and "Insult to the Minister of the Interior" had caused an international outcry. The City of Paris then made him an honorary citizen for "His fight for human rights". Co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and founder of the Gulf Center for Human Rights, Nabil Rajab is a figure of the protest movement, essentially Shiite, who demands a constitutional monarchy in the small Gulf country governed by the Sunni Khalifa dynasty.
In 2011, he led protests that saw tens of thousands of Bahrainis take to the streets to demand their rights. The movement had been bloodied with the help of Saudi and Emirati troops.
Since 2011, the golf kingdom, seat of the Ve American fleet, is waging a fierce campaign of repression against its opponents. Authorities have banished major opposition parties and groups, detained hundreds of dissidents and stripped over 700 Bahrainis of their citizenship. Nabil Rajab has therefore been a recurring target of the Manama authorities. In 2012, he was sentenced to three years in prison, accused of causing unrest between the police and the demonstrators.
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