Arab Gulf States: Attempts to Silence 140 Characters

by HRW

According to Human Rights Watch “Gulf governments have attempted to silence peaceful critics in response to a wave of online activism in recent years, Human Rights Watch said in an interactive website that began operating today. The governments have responded to online criticism with surveillance, arrests, and other arbitrary punishments.

In a nod to Twitter’s 140-character limit, this interactive website presents the profiles of 140 prominent Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Omani, Qatari, Saudi, and Emirati social and political rights activists and dissidents and describes their struggles to resist government efforts to silence them. All 140 have faced government retaliation for exercising their right to freedom of expression, and many have been arrested, tried, and sentenced to fines or prison. Profiled activists include Nabeel Rajab and Zainab al-Khawaja from Bahrain, Waleed Abu al-Khair and Mohammed Fahad al-Qahtani from Saudi Arabia, and Ahmed Mansoor and Mohammed al-Roken from the United Arab Emirates.

“The Gulf states have engaged in a systematic and well-funded assault on free speech to subvert the potentially transformative impact of social media and internet technology,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director. “Instead of hauling off their peaceful online critics to jail, Gulf governments should expand debate among members of society and carry out the much-needed reforms that many of these activists have demanded for years.”

In recent years, the popularity and use of social networking sites and group messaging apps such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube have expanded rapidly in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the Arab Social Media Report of the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government, GCC countries opened accounts for 17.2 million Facebook users and 3.5 million Twitter users through the first quarter of 2014. By late 2015, Saudi Arabia alone maintained 2.4 million active Twitter users, more than 40 percent of all Twitter users in the Middle East. Increased human rights advocacy and opposition political activity and government efforts to counter them have been closely tied to this expansion.

Hundreds of dissidents, including political activists, human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and bloggers, have been imprisoned across the region, many after unfair trials and allegations of torture in pretrial detention. GCC rulers’ sweeping campaigns against activists and political dissidents have included threats, intimidation, investigations, prosecution, detention, torture, and withdrawal of citizenship.

Most of the activists profiled used social media and online forums to initiate campaigns, build networks, and increase awareness of their ideas, and all either explicitly or implicitly criticized their governments. Tens of thousands of Saudi citizens, for example, have participated in online campaigns, such as a call to free Samar Badawi, a woman jailed for “parental disobedience” in 2010, and online advocacy campaigns encouraging Saudi women to drive in defiance of a government ban”.

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(1 novembre 2016)

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