Nabeel Rajab. Conor McCabe. Public Domain. The saying goes that the wheels of justice turn exceedingly slow, but grind exceedingly fine.
As seems to be the case in many authoritarian states, the Government of Bahrain may have taken this expression a bit too literally. Observers of the small Arab Gulf kingdom – not unlike its some 4,000 political prisoners – are hard-pressed to keep up with a laborious judicial system whose interminable fits and starts are rife with due process violations.
On one hand, Bahrain’s judicial proceedings do indeed grind unbearably slow, bogged down by excessive pre-trial detention periods and seemingly endless postponements. In political cases – a category under which prosecutions disproportionately fall in Bahrain – the government deftly exploits these practices to extrajudicially (or perhaps pre-judicially) punish protestors and activists while gradually diverting or exhausting international attention.
