Activist should not be punished for denouncing abuse

A leading human rights organisation is urging the Bahraini government to drop the charges against a woman’s rights activist set to be tried on Saturday for criticisng family court judges. Ghada Jamsheer faces up to 15 years in prison for three incidents of alleged “slander” over her criticism of how women are treated by the family court system, says the New York-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“Ghada Jamsheer is being punished for exposing the injustice that women face in the courtroom,” said HRW’s women’s director LaShawn R. Jefferson. “These lawsuits are a blatant attempt to silence her and undermine the reform efforts she spearheads.”

Jamsheer is a leading women’s rights activist in Bahrain and heads the Women’s Petition Committee, which is pushing for the kingdom’s family laws to be codified and the family courts to be reformed. She has organised protests, vigils and a hunger strike to draw attention to the suffering of women in the current court system.

Bahrain has two separate Sharia (Islamic law) based family courts, for Sunni and Shiite Muslims, which hear personal status cases, including marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance cases. As the laws are uncodified, the judges are free to make judgments based on their own reading of Islamic jurisprudence. Human Rights Watch says the judges are generally conservative religious scholars with limited formal training, many of whom “are unapologetically adverse to women’s equality and persistently favour men in their rulings.”

Since 2001 the Women’s Petition Committee has documented hundreds of such cases, for example, where judges deny women custody of their children because they work or are studying higher education. Dozens of complaints have been presented to the justice ministry and the King’s office, but despite promises to grant divorced women presumptive custody of their children, little action has been taken, HRW says.

Jamsheer faces three trials – the first of which is due to begin in the capital Manama on Saturday – in which she is accused of slander for calling Bahrain’s family court judges “corrupt, biased and unqualified” and branding one specific judge “rude and unfair”. She also faces criminal charges brought by the ex-husband of a woman whose case the committee took on. She is charged under a part of the penal code which has been widely condemned for allowing the government to suppress public criticism.

Human Rights Watch is also calling on the Bahraini government to eliminate the criminal penalties for slander in cases that do not involve direct and immediate incitement to acts of violence or discrimination.

“Rather than putting one of Bahrain’s most committed activists on trial, the government should work with Ghada Jamsheer to immediately address the issues that her organisation has brought to light,” Jefferson said.