A prominent Bahraini activist who played a key role in the 2011 Shiite-led anti-government protests yesterday lost his final appeal against a five-year jail term for writing tweets deemed offensive to the state.
The Gulf state’s supreme court upheld the jail term against Nabeel Rajab, his second imprisonment verdict this year, for criticizing the Sunni-ruled monarchy on social media, a judicial source said.
Rights groups were swift to condemn the latest verdict.
“Nabeel Rajab is a prisoner of conscience. It is utterly outrageous that he has already spent two years behind bars — including nine agonizing months in solitary confinement, amounting to torture,” Amnesty International said.
It said Bahraini authorities should have quashed his conviction and sentence, and released him immediately and unconditionally.
“By arranging the final verdict to fall during the holidays, a time when international attention will be minimal, the intentions of Bahrain’s rulers have been made clear,” the London-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy said in a statement. “This appears to be a planned outcome, prepared well in advance.”
The verdict “illustrates that Bahrain’s corrupt political system sought to continue his [Rajab] political persecution,” it added.
Rajab, a high-profile rights activist who is already serving a two-year term in another case, was first handed the sentence in February by a lower court and an appeals court confirmed it in June.
He was convicted of insulting the state by “deliberately disseminating” false and malicious news on social media.
He was also convicted of criticizing the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen and publicly offending a foreign nation, a reference to Saudi Arabia.
The court convicted him of endangering Bahrain’s military operations in Yemen. Manama is part of the Saudi-led coalition that has been fighting the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels since March 2015.
He also tweeted criticism of the Bahraini government’s treatment of prisoners.
In January, the same court upheld a two-year imprisonment against Rajab after convicting him of press statements critical to the government.
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