Bahrain

Bahrain’s human rights climate continue to be dire. Courts convict and imprison prominent human rights defenders and opposition leaders for their peaceful activism and file abusive charges against their relatives. Security forces use excessive force to disperse peaceful assemblies. Police forces and officers at the National Security Agency ill-treat, threaten, and coerce alleged suspects into signing confessions. Authorities have failed to hold officials accountable for torture. Courts have stripped the citizenship of hundreds of citizens and deported dozens of them, including dissidents, journalists, and lawyers as punishments for offenses that, in reality, include peaceful criticism of the government. Authorities in 2017 shut down the only remaining independent newspaper in the country and ahead of parliamentary elections in November 2018, parliament banned members of dissolved opposition parties from being able to run.