Bahrain: Children’s Rights Violated in Detention
Bahraini authorities abuse and threaten children detained in connection with protests and other forms of political expression, Human Rights Watch and Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) said today. In separate investigations, the rights groups found that although Bahraini authorities released many children from detention in 2024, they have continued to arrest and detain children and violate their rights.
Bahraini authorities should take urgent steps to end the abuse of children in detention, and should only detain children as a last resort in exceptional cases. They should also compensate or provide other appropriate remedies for people who have suffered abuse in detention, including children deprived of their rights during critical childhood years, such as limiting their access to education.
“No child or adult who is participating in peaceful protest should be arrested, tortured, and abused,” said Niku Jafarnia, Bahrain and Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Bahraini authorities have stolen many children’s childhoods by detaining and torturing them and denying them access to their families and to school.”
Between November 2023 and September 2024, Human Rights Watch spoke with eight men who had been detained as children between 2013 and 2019 and who were released between 2019 and 2024. Human Rights Watch also interviewed four mothers whose sons were detained after October 2023 either while participating in protests in support of Palestinian rights or because they had been perceived as protesting.
In most of the 12 cases, the children were beaten or threatened with torture, including rape, and most were denied adequate access to lawyers and to their families. Parents of some detainees said that many were not initially charged with anything when they were arrested, and that officials arbitrarily extended the children’s detention.
Most of the men who had been detained as children and later released stated that they had been beaten during interrogation and in detention. Some also described mental and physical torture, while others said they were threatened with torture, including rape in many cases. Several said that they had been forced to confess to crimes they had not committed.
One man, who was 15 years old when he was arrested, said: “During the interrogation, [the authorities] were hitting me, and took my clothes off, and threaten[ed] me with rape … [one officer] used to come and hold my testicles and tell me to speak and to confess.”
Another man who had also been arrested when he was 15 years old described being tortured during interrogation. “During the torture, they were harassing me and touching me in private areas of my body: when I got to the [investigation unit] I couldn’t stand on my legs due to the torture that I had, so two soldiers came and carried me to the office.”
Several said they had been denied adequate medical care and adequate food. One said that he lost several teeth as a result of being denied access to dental care despite his many requests. Another said that he had scabies in detention but that authorities, including medical personnel at the prison, denied him medical care.
Several were also denied access to education, in some cases for years.
Since being released, all eight men described onerous ongoing rights restrictions, including to travel, and being denied work permits. One man said, “I want to live freely, to be able to travel, go back and forth freely, I want to be able to work wherever I want.”
While many children were released from detention in 2024, Human Rights Watch has found that others have been detained since then. One mother, whose son was arrested in August 2024 after participating in peaceful protests when he was 15, said that the authorities took her son “from the street” without notifying his family of his detention or his whereabouts for many hours. She said that authorities repeatedly extended his detention, similar to many of the other cases. “He is a good student, and he cares very much about his school, so he is very upset that he is missing classes,” she said.
In December 2023, Human Rights Watch reported that Bahraini authorities had arrested 57 people, including at least 25 children, in relation to pro-Palestine protests in Bahrain. In three cases that Human Rights Watch documented, children were denied due process rights and denied adequate access to their families and lawyers.
ADHRB’s research indicates that this pattern of abuses has continued. In the report released today, the organization stated that since April 2024, “dozens of children have been summoned and arrested on fabricated charges linked to freedom of expression, assembly, or holding political views critical of the government.” In 11 cases that the group documented in detail, children were arbitrarily detained, were not provided with due process rights or access to their families, and were coerced into confessing to crimes “through threats and psychological and physical torture.”
This new research follows years of documentation by ADHRB, Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD), Human Rights Watch, and other organizations of arbitrary detention and abuse of children by Bahraini authorities.
In 2021, Human Rights Watch and BIRD reported that Bahraini authorities had beaten children arrested in protest-related cases in February 2021 and threatened them with rape and electric shocks. Police and prosecutors refused to allow parents or lawyers for the children, ages 11 to 17, to be present during their interrogations, and judges unnecessarily ordered their detention.
Also in 2021, an Al Jazeera investigation found that at least 607 detained children had been tortured by Bahraini authorities over a decade.
International law prohibits detaining children except if necessary as a last resort and for the shortest appropriate period. The authorities have not explained why it was necessary to detain children who had repeatedly appeared when summoned.
Bahrain should release all children whose detention is not justifiable under the narrow conditions international law prescribes and should not prosecute or detain anyone in retaliation for their exercise of free expression rights. Governments that support Bahrain and its police and security forces, including the United States and the United Kingdom, should ensure that that they are not funding abuses and should publicly demand accountability.
Bahrain’s 2021 Restorative Justice Law for Children sets the minimum age of criminal responsibility at 15, but permits authorities to “place the child in a social welfare institution” for renewable weekly periods “if the circumstances require.” Bahrain should revise the law to clearly provide for a child’s right to have their parents and a lawyer present during interrogations, and to challenge their deprivation of liberty. Bahrain should also revoke the law’s determination that children who participate in unlicensed public assemblies may be considered “endangered, “institutionalized on that basis, and deprived of their liberty.
The Bahraini government should provide appropriate remedies to people detained and abused or tortured as children, including for example by providing them with adequate access to work and education opportunities, the organizations said.
“Governments allied with Bahrain should end their whitewashing of Bahrain’s abuses against children and ensure that their support to Bahrain does not underwrite repression,” Jafarnia said.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/03/10/bahrain-authorities-violate-detained-childrens-rights