Bahrain Recommendations
Top British QCs appointed to help Bahrain push reforms and give the country recommendations on human rights.
Information Affairs Authority, Manama, 03 January 2012: TWO top British lawyers have been appointed to assist the Government of Bahrain in pushing through the recommendations on Bahrain human rights by an independent commission.
Sir Daniel Bethlehem KCMG QC, former principal Legal Adviser to the UK Foreign Office, and Sir Jeffrey Jowell QC, Emeritus Professor of Public Law at University College London, will begin their crucial work this month.
Sir Daniel and Sir Jeffrey will be responsible for advising on a number of important accountability mechanisms including establishing a national watchdog to bring to justice police officers responsible for torture, death or mistreatment of civilians.
They will be joined shortly by other leading international lawyers with expertise in areas such as international human rights and civil law, relevant to the implementation of the BICI recommendations.
Sir Daniel and Sir Jeffrey will be responsible for advising on a number of important accountability mechanisms including establishing a national watchdog to bring to justice police officers responsible for torture, death or mistreatment of civilians.
The Government has pledged that the recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) will be implemented by the end of February. Many of the recommendations have already been implemented, and all others have either been partially implemented or are in progress via the new National Commission charged with seeing the reforms through.
Already the Commission and Government has taken action in the following areas:
• All charges against protestors relating to freedom of speech dropped;
• All public sector employees dismissed for free speech activity reinstated; private sector employees’ reinstatement under discussion;
• Judicial panel of civilian judges set up to review convictions and verdicts on protestors by the National Safety Courts;
• The Public Prosecutor pursuing 28 police and security officers over deaths and torture since the BICI report, in addition to the 20 officers already investigated;
• The National Security Agency, which was heavily criticized in the report, has been stripped of its law enforcement and arrest powers, and its chief replaced;
• All interviews by the police of civilian suspects will be recorded on film;
• An extensive program of public order, arrest and detention training to be conducted by UK and US ‘super cops’;
• Immediate recruitment drive to create 500 jobs for all sections of Bahrain society within the Ministry of Interior at the officer level to support an expansion of community police operations;
• Committee put in place on the reconstruction of mosques, with construction already underway on four sites.
The press release above has been issued by Information Affairs Authority, P.O. Box 253, Isa Town, Kingdom of Bahrain Tel: (+973) 17 872 556 / Fax: (+973) 17 682 777.