#WeHearYou: Use your voice to support Bahrain political prisoners Index on Censorship

15.6.17

#WeHearYou: Use your voice to support Bahrain political prisoners Index on Censorship: Rebecca Hickman is a research intern at the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.

I am a citizen of the United Kingdom, and until recently, with the exception of fleeting mentions in school geography classes, I had never heard of Bahrain. When discussing the Arab Spring during university classes professors spoke, for the most part, of Tunisia and Egypt, the fight of the Bahraini people was silenced, rushed over and mentioned as a brief afterthought — if at all.

Now, I talk about Bahrain on a daily basis, I read and write about the cases of people imprisoned for expressing anti-government opinions, tortured for fighting for human rights, and forcibly disappeared for daring to expose government brutality. I help to tell the story of the Bahraini people, to raise the voices of those imprisoned, their families, and the Bahraini people.

My government is a friend of Bahrain, representatives of my country frequently visit the Gulf state, most recently my Queen was pictured laughing with the Bahraini King at the Windsor Horse Show. A year ago I would not have had a second thought about this picture, I would have skipped over it in the newspaper, and scrolled past it on my social media. This time, I was disappointed, disappointed in my country for failing to address the human rights abuses in Bahrain. That is not my country, not the one that I belong to, nor the one my friends and family call home.