A SCOTTISH MP has spoken of his horror at how Britain is paying £1.8 million a year to fund policing institutions in Bahrain where prisoners are sentenced to death on the basis of confessions that have been beaten out of them.
Alistair Carmichael, LibDem spokesman on Home Affairs and Justice, was speaking at the launch of a new report which calls for a halt to payments by the Gulf Strategy Fund (GSF) to security forces in the Gulf state where 26 men are on death row.
Many were convicted solely on the basis of confessions extracted through torture methods including electric shocks, beatings, sexual assaults and hanging by the arms for days.
“I think most British taxpayers will be absolutely horrified to learn about the use to which money which we pay to foreign governments is being put.”, Carmichael said.
“The fact that it’s going to a system which uses the death penalty in this way just takes that to another level.”
He was speaking at the Westminster launch of the report, called "The Court is Satisfied with the Confession": Bahrain Death Sentences Follow Torture, Sham Trials, compiled by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD).
It examined six cases where prisoners have been sentenced to death solely on the basis of confessions that are claimed to have been extracted through beatings, sleep deprivation and use of electrical shocks to the chest and genitals.
Hotel bellboy Maher Abbas al-Khabbaz was arrested after a policeman was killed with a flare gun at pro-democracy demonstration. This was despite an alibi saying he was at work at the time with no other evidence against him.
He said: “Officers tied and hanged me using a metal bar between my legs. They then started beating me. They took off my shoes and socks and put them in my mouth. They started hitting me with a plastic club for long hours everywhere on my body. I remained in this state for a few days until blood stopped reaching my legs”.
The 27-year-old said he provided false information to “buy himself some time and stop the torture” but the abuse began again when it was discovered he’d been lying. His conviction was based on the confession of his brother, Fadhel, who was also tortured.
“We could hear each other’s screams when we were beaten.”, he said.
The family of Mohamed Ramadhan, 37, is campaigning for his release after the father-of-three was sentenced to death for the killing of a policeman hit by a flare during pro-democracy protests.
Campaigners say there is no evidence against the former security guard except for a confession of another man, Husain Moosa, extracted under torture.
According to a freedom of information request by BIRD the Bahrain Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of the Interior Ombudsman, and the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) in 2020-21 all received funding from the GSF, and all were implicated in the report.
Two oversight bodies – the ombudsman and SIU – were heavily criticised for not investigating claims of physical abuse that were often backed by medical evidence. One dismissed claims of torture simply because officers involved “denied committing abuses”.
Carmichael, a longtime campaigner against the death penalty across the world, said he was surprised how soft the UK was being on Bahrain over human rights abuses.
He said: “The thing that really concerns me about Bahrain – I’ve been involved in death penalty campaigning for the past 20 years – is that the conspiracy of silence is not just political. It runs through the whole of the official and diplomatic effort in Bahrain.
“I’ve visited America a few times, I’ve campaigned there for people on death row, and I’ve been to Japan and in all these places the UK diplomatic mission, the embassy and the consulates, were all incredibly supportive because they were part of a government effort that said: ‘We condemn the use of capital punishment wherever we find it’.
“But our interaction with diplomats from the UK mission in Bahrain, I have to say, has been one which looked more like advocacy for the Bahrain government in Britain rather than British standards in Bahrain. That is why this is particularly acute and anything that we can do to draw attention towards what’s going on will create in the United Kingdom that outrage that our money’s being used in this way.”
The Foreign Office said it funded projects in Bahrain to support the country’s reforms of its justice system.
A spokesman said: “All projects on justice and security issues with partners overseas are subject to rigorous risk assessments to meet our human rights’ expectations. While we recognise challenges remain, stepping back from supporting reforms would be counterproductive.”
