SALAM: Sentences carried out by Judiciary in Bahrain confirms its partiality and exploited as a political punishment mechanism

Bahrain’s High Criminal Court issued two judgments on two murder cases. The first case is that of a police officer who, on 8 January 2014, killed Bahraini civilian FadhilAbbas, who was shot at numerous times and killed in the Al-Murkh area. The police officer, who is employed in the Ministry of Interior, contravened laws governing an escaping arrestee, by firing numerous times at him, with the fatal shot hitting the victim’s head. The police officer proceeded to fire rounds in the stomach of another Bahraini civilian, Sadiq Jaffar Asfoor.

Regarding the second case of the killing of the police officer in Al-Ikr, the High Criminal Court on 29 April 2014, issued a death penalty against 1 defendant, life sentences against 7, 10-year imprisonment against 4 others, and all will also have their nationality stripped.The defendants have forced confessions extracted from them, and the reasoning and qualifications of their sentences remain obscure.

The defendants’ names, ages and sentences are as follows:
1.
Salman Isa (30 years-old) – death penalty
2.
Ali Maki (26 years-old) – life imprisonment
3.
Isa Moosa (21 years-old) – life imprisonment
4.
Abdulla Abduljalil (25 years-old) – life imprisonment
5.
Abdulhadi Ali Hassan (21 years-old) – life imprisonment
6.
Yusuf Abdulla Al-Nu’ti (19 years-old) – life imprisonment
7.
Abdulamir Hassan Radhi (33 years-old) – life imprisonment
8.
Hassan Abdulla Bati (18 years-old) – 10-year sentence
9.
Jaffar Yusuf Jassim (18 years-old) – 10-year sentence
10.
Jaffar Abdulamir Jaffar (18 years-old) – 10-year sentence
11.
Hussain Abdulatif Mansoor (19 years-old) – 10-year sentence
12.
Hassan Ahmed Sharaf (18 years-old) – 10-year sentence
SALAM for Democracy and Human Rights reaffirms what it has mentioned in its reports and statements that the judiciary has become a tool for political revenge and suppression.

The judiciary in Bahrain now regularly strips thenationality of citizens as an extra layer of punishment, to increase the harshness of its decisions. The total number of stripped citizens is 136, with 8 sentenced to death andhundreds of other Bahrainis sentenced to life imprisonment.

Bahrain is in a dire need of a formation of an international commission from the UN to consider the mechanisms of the Bahraini judiciary and its decisionsregarding events after February 2011.