Huddersfield Quakers support torture victims
Huddersfield Friends horrified at verdict
Huddersfield Friends have said they are ‘horrified’ that the death sentences of two Bahraini activists was upheld by Bahrain’s highest court despite international concern that they were tortured.
The Yorkshire Quakers urged people to keep saying the activists’ names aloud: Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa. The pro-democracy activists were arrested after a police officer was killed in a bombing in 2014.
Huddersfield Quakers tweeted: ‘We are horrified to hear this verdict. We will continue to work for the freedom of all nonviolent human rights activists in #Bahrain.’
The issue was raised twice in the Houses of Parliament after forty-six MPs and peers, rights groups and international lawyers wrote an open letter to The Independent calling on the UK government to urgently intervene. Cross-party politicians piled pressure on the government with Labour MP Stephen Doughty urging them to raise this ‘at the highest levels, including with the King’.
Bel Trew, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, reported that according to rights groups Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa were sentenced to death on the back of a confession extracted through torture but these ‘allegations of torture were investigated and then effectively thrown out’. Mohammed’s wife Zainab Ebrahim, barred from the courtroom, told the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD): ‘The terror of knowing that my husband can be executed by firing squad… without proper notice is tearing me apart. I don’t know how I will be able to tell my three children.’
Huddersfield Friends urged people to hold those affected in the Light and support their longstanding campaign against the University of Huddersfield’s MSc for Royal Bahrain Police.
Last month they took part in an event, organised by BIRD and Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB), to mark the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
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