News - Middle East - Bahrain: Death sentences in Bahrain have risen by over 600 per cent since the start of the Arab Spring and the use of torture is “drastically escalating”, a new report has found.

According to British online newspaper The Independent, the joint report released by UK charity Reprieve and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) found that at least 51 people have been sentenced to death since the 2011 Arab Spring protests, compared with seven death sentences in the decade before.

The increase in death sentences occures in cases that the tiny Gulf country classifies as “terrorism” cases, which are cases of expression of opinion and political activism, in addition to the radical escalation in the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners.

Some 88 percent of men executed in Bahrain since 2011 were convicted of “terror” charges, and 100 percent of these individuals alleged torture, the report found.

Today, some 26 men are facing imminent execution on death row, 11 of whom allege torture by Bahraini authorities. According to court documents, this includes individuals whose convictions were based on false torture “confessions”, the report said.

It noted the United Nations Committee Against Torture raised concerns about “the widespread acceptance by judges of forced confessions” in Bahrain, and recommended that judges “should review cases of convictions based solely on confessions, since many may have been based on evidence obtained through torture and ill-treatment”.

Commenting on the report, Ahmed Alwadaei, director of BIRD, said: “Sentencing torture survivors to death for their opposition to the government is a heinous act of revenge by Bahrain’s regime.

In its recommendations, Reprieve and BIRD urged the Bahraini government to implement an “immediate moratorium on the use of the death penalty, pending a full review of all capital cases to identify allegations of torture”.

They have also called on the courts in Bahrain to “quash all death sentences and overturn any convictions that rely on torture evidence”.

Source: Agencies