Four years after the BICI report, Bahrain announced the formation of “follow-up commissions” to implement the recommendations. Today, HRW said the government’s claims “that it had ended torture are simply not credible”.  

Human Rights Watch newly released report: “The Blood of People Who Don’t Cooperate”, revealed testimonies of victims of torture in Bahrain. The report said all interviewed victims “said security officers had physically assaulted them. Several described being subjected to electric shocks; suspension in painful positions, including by their wrists while handcuffed; forced standing; extreme cold; and sexual abuse. Six said that the CID interrogators boasted of their reputation for inflicting pain on detainees”.

“I’ll show you why Wifaq [Bahrain’s leading opposition party] calls Bahrain the capital of torture,” a former detainee quoted an interrogator as telling him. Another said a CID officer held something to his nose and told him it was “the blood of people who don’t cooperate.”

Joe Stork, the organization’s Deputy Middle East Director, stated, “The claims of Bahrain and its allies that authorities have ended torture in detention are simply not credible. All the available evidence supports the conclusion that these new [governmental human rights] institutions have not effectively tackled what the BICI report described as a ‘culture of impunity’ among security forces” as

The 84-page report washed away the Bahraini government’s claims of implementing the recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) by confirming that “security forces have continued the same abuses documented in its November 2011 report”.

“Bahrain should issue an immediate and open invitation to the UN special rapporteur on torture to conduct a country visit and allow unfettered access to detainees and all places of detention”, Human Rights Watch said. “Bahrain should ensure the independence of the Office of the Ombudsman and the PDRC by removing them from the Ministry of Interior and taking steps to guarantee the independence of the SIU from the Office of the Public Prosecutor, which has until now failed to establish a record of holding perpetrators of torture accountable”.

In an event organized by Al Wefaq National Islamic Society in Bahrain, marking four years on the release of the report, Al Wefaq’s member of advisory board, Hamid Khalaf, said, “If the recommendations of the BICI report were fully implemented we would have prevented our country the many political and human rights problems. Some wrongly think the more suppression, arrests and violence there is the closer we are to a resolution, but the truth is right the opposite”.

Khalaf renewed the opposition’s calls to immediately and urgently schedule visits for the UN Special Rapporteurs which were indefinitely postponed by the Bahraini government.

Human Rights Watch further recommended that “the government set up a civilian oversight committee, including well-regarded independent experts, to scrutinize the work of the Special Investigations Unit and ensure its independence from the Interior Ministry and public prosecution”. An issue the BICI report included in its 26 recommendations, but Bahrain’s opposition has so far been excluded from the implementation and oversight process.

“What we had feared has happened with the government’s first infringement of the commission’s recommendations by failing to form an independent and neutral national commission that includes representatives of the opposition societies, civil society organizations and national personalities to oversee the implementation process”, said Abdulsamad Alnashaba, Secretary General of the National Democratic Assemblage. “The political powers had warned, early enough, of any steps that would be taken in intention to stall or the implementation falsely promote it has been partly completed”. He said the role of any oversight commission should not be limited to presenting consultations, instead, it must be empowered to add new legislations and amend those laws that allow for such rights violations to take place.

Al Wefaq’s head of human rights department, Hadi Almusawi, outlined that Bahrain fully rejected and partly rejected 15 and 45 out of 146 recommendations issued by the UN’s Human Rights Council, respectively. Further, he said the implementation process of the BICI recommendations has been either partly done or made in the opposition direction.

“Believe me, those who worked on the [BICI] report are upset because they had hoped that their report would be a rescue boat for [Bahraini] society”, Almusawi said. “We found that those who base their testimonies on this report are prosecuted, as has happened to the Secretary General of Al Wefaq, Sheikh Ali Salman. We hope to see the day where nobody is arrested because he/she spoke about this report”.

“A credible government would truly implement all recommendations so the perpetrators will not repeat violations”, he said.

HRW Dispatch: Bahrain: Detainees Tortured, Abused