Demonstrations against ‘fake’ elections continue in Bahrain – News of the World

Videos circulating online showed protesters in the residential town of Sal, west of Manama, and in the village of Sanabis, on the outskirts of the capital, taking to the streets against the Nov. 12 election.

Protesters stage a demonstration in solidarity with free speech prisoners in a Bahrain prison.

They held pictures of Bahrain’s most prominent Shiite cleric, Sheikh Itsa Qasim, and imprisoned opposition leader Sheikh Ali Salman. They also held placards that read: “Boycott the election,” “Your vote will upset the martyrs,” and “Boycotting the election is a religious obligation.”

Despite the strict restrictions imposed by the ruling Khalifa regime, protesters across Bahrain have held demonstrations almost daily to demonstrate their condemnation of the regime’s repressive policies.

Last month, Bahrain’s Shiite-led opposition groups, including the National Unity Movement, said in a statement that they would boycott parliamentary elections as the vote was to establish “absolute rule in Bahrain”.

Last week, Ithaqsim dismissed the country’s elections, saying the ruling regime wanted to maintain control of power through the ballot box and reinforce tyranny in the small Persian Gulf kingdom.

People are demanding that the Khalifa regime renounce power and allow a just system representing all Bahrainis. However, Manama has gone to great lengths to combat any form of dissent.

The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) has hosted a photo exhibition showing Khalifa’s crimes and repression outside the historic Palais Wilson building in Geneva, Switzerland, where the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is based.

To inform the world of Bahrain’s human rights abuses, the exhibition features photos of political prisoners and civil rights activists imprisoned or tortured to death in detention centres.

The photo exhibition coincides with Monday’s review of Bahrain’s human rights record by the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Working Group.

In September, the BCHR said in a report that under the ruling Khalifa dynasty, Bahrain had the highest number of jailed activists, with some 4,500 activists held in prisons across the country.

It noted that political prisoners in Bahrain were subjected to various forms of torture, ill-treatment and persecution, and that the regime silenced any dissenting voices through detention, torture and execution.