S. Reda Humaidan, son of the detained Photojournalist Ahmed Humaidan who was arrested in January 2014 for covering Bahrain uprising. Photo: NurPhoto/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved.
This article is part of our series on the 2017 International Civil Society Week, where CIVICUS and the Pacific Islands Association of non-Governmental Organisations (PIANGO) brought civil society members and activists from around the world together to discuss some of the key challenges our planet is facing. You can see more of what came out of the event here.
The Day of Rage may have been the beginning of Bahrain’s national uprising, but the roots of this civil resistance lay much deeper. The series of protests that erupted on 14 February 2011 were organised exactly ten years after the National Charter, which committed to the transformation of the country into a constitutional monarchy, was approved by nearly 95% in a popular vote. A year after that display of common suffrage, the monarch moved to curtail the newly established democratic powers of the parliament. When Bahranis took to the streets on that morning in 2011, they were reminding the monarch of the unfulfilled democratic transformation that had been promised to them ten years before.
