Pope Francis urged to press Bahrain on human rights issues

Pope Francis has been urged to press Bahrain to end human rights abuses during his first visit to the island kingdom, which begins today.

Human Rights Watch, speaking on behalf of nine rights organisations, has called on the pope to “publicly and privately” urge Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa to commute death sentences, end executions, ban torture and release people jailed for exercising freedom of expression and association. The pope has also been asked to call for an end to abuse of migrant workers, who constitute a large proportion of the foreigners making up half the 1.5 million people in the island kingdom.

Pope Francis will address the Bahrain Forum for Dialogue, a government-sponsored inter-faith gathering of 200 global figures. Among the prelates Pope Francis will meet is Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayyeb, grand imam of Egypt’s 1,000-year-old al-Azhar mosque, which is the seat of Sunni Muslim learning. Sheikh Ahmed is the senior source of Sunni religious rulings and chairman of the Muslim Council of Elders.

This is Pope Francis’s second trip to the Gulf. His visited Abu Dhabi in 2019 to promote relations with the Muslim world while celebrating the presence in Muslim countries of Catholic communities.

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More than 20,000 people are expected to attend a papal mass at the Bahrain National Stadium on Saturday.

In its appeal to the pope, Human Rights Watch wrote, “Bahrain has executed six people since 2017, when the country ended a de facto moratorium on the death penalty. Twenty-six people are currently on death row in Bahrain”. It accused Bahraini courts of obtaining coerced confessions from at least eight of the men sentenced to death. Although investigations of these allegations “concluded that no ill treatment had occurred” this was “contradicted by undisputed evidence”, including testimony from physicians, Human Rights Watch stated.

The organisation said Pope Francis should use his visit to press for the unconditional release of prominent Shia opposition figures who have been imprisoned since the island’s 2011 Arab Spring pro-democracy protests which were crushed by Saudi and Emirati forces.

Since taking power in 1999 King Hamad – scion of a Sunni dynasty – has improved living standards and made Bahrain a financial hub but he has also tried to subjugate and reduce the Shia majority, estimated at 55 per cent. He has detained Shia leaders, revoked activists’ citizenship, and exercised tight control over Shia villages. He has imported Sunni tribesmen from Arabia, recruited Pakistanis into the armed forces, and increased the representation in parliament of radical Sunni parties.

The undersecretary of Bahrain’s information ministry did not reply to The Irish Times’ request for a comment on the Human Rights Watch report.