Bahrain jail inmates reject partial plan and persist with large-scale hunger strike

Hundreds of inmates at Bahrain’s notorious Jau prison are continuing the largest hunger strike in the island nation’s history after rejecting a government proposal which partially addresses prisoners’ demands.

The “We Have a Right” strike has been staged by political prisoners to put pressure on the authorities to deliver on promises to improve living conditions.

Hunger strikes are frequent in Bahraini prisons. This year there were 51 hunger strikes by individuals before the mass strike began.

The proposal was put forward by interior minister Gen Shaikh Rashid bin Abdullah al-Khalifa, National Institution for Human Rights chairman Ali Ahmed al-Derazi and head of the Prisoners and Detainees Rights Commission Ghada Hameed Habib. Both rights organisations are state-affiliated. The proposal promised an imrovement in health services, easing restrictions on family visits, increasing educational opportunities and increasing time outside cells from one to two hours daily.

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“The offer is too little too late,” said Sayed Alwadaei, a former prisoner and advocacy director at Britain-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird). The government proposal came more than three weeks into the protest which, Mr Alwadaei said, “is probably the most powerful strike that has ever happened in the Bahraini prison system. The scale is overwhelming.”

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The hunger strike was initiated on August 7th by 400 inmates, but Bird claims there are now 804 prisoners refusing food. The authorities claim the number of hunger strikers is 121.

Bird has reported that Jau holds most of Bahrain’s 12,000 political prisoners. It says the prison population is between 32,000-38,000. This is, Bird claims, among the highest incarceration rates per capita in the region. Bahrain has a population of 1.48 million, half of whom are Bahraini nationals,

Released detainees and human rights activists claim political prisoners endure abuse and solitary confinement. Inmates say they are held in their cells for 23 hours a day. They claim that family visits are restricted, there is no access to education and they cannot attend communal prayers at the prison mosque. Detainees accuse the government of “slow murder” by refusing timely and adequate medical care.

Nobel Prize nominee Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a 62-year-old Bahraini-Danish human rights defender, was taken to intensive care at a military hospital with cardiac problems four days after he joined the hunger strike, according to his daughter Maryam al-Khawaja.

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In a joint letter to European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, 15 human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, urged him to “press the Bahraini authorities to immediately and unconditionally release all those arbitrarily detained for their political beliefs, on abusive charges or after grossly unfair trials.”

The letter said all prisoners should receive “urgent access to healthcare and humane prison conditions”.

A leading rights campaigner in the Gulf, Mr Khawaja and other activists were sentenced to life or long terms in prison following the crackdown by King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa on 2011 Arab Spring pro-democracy protests. They were mounted by majority Shia Bahrainis demanding an end to discrimination and repression by the Sunni minority. Shia Iran was accused of orchestrating the unrest. Saudi Arabia sent troops and the Emirates provided police to help Bahraini forces to suppress the rising.