The Acting Attorney General, head of the Special Investigation Unit (SIU), stated that the Unit had received during the first third of this year 14 complaints, the allegations varied between torture, abuse of treatment and the use of excessive force by members of the General Security Forces, and the Unit took the necessary legal measures in all these complaints.
Regarding the statistics of the SIU’s work during the mentioned period; The Unit Interviewed 33 complainants and witnesses, while 43 accused were interviewed from the General Security Forces and referred 18 complainants to the Forensic Medicine and Psychological Support Division.
Regarding what the Unit accomplished during the same period; The Unit has completed its investigations into a person claiming that he was subjected to physical abuse with the knowledge of a member of the Public Security Forces and ordered that the accused be submitted to the competent criminal court, and the session of the case will be on May 15, 2023.
With regard to the follow-up of the Unit of the cases referred to it to the competent courts; On January 26, 2023, the Minor Criminal Court sentenced a member of the General Security Forces to be acquitted of the accusation, while the High Criminal Court ruled on January 31, 2023, to punish four members of the Public Security Forces by imprisonment for a year for the accusation attributed to them, and the ruling was affirmed.
In the same context, the Unit received disciplinary penalties from the Military Courts Administration in the Ministry of Interior against two members of the Public Security Forces in a case that previously ordered the referral to the Military Courts Administration to sign the appropriate disciplinary penalty for them.
On the other hand, SIU launched its website on the end of February, which comes within the strategy of digital transformation and technology and enhances the principle of transparency that the Unit has adopted since its establishment, where it is possible through the site to file complaints and see the periodic and annual reports issued by the Unit.
The head of the SIU concluded his statement by referring to the end of the activities of the national training program to enhance the capabilities of those concerned with the protection of human rights in the criminal justice system, which started at the end of last October and for a period of six months, it was a joint organization of the Special Investigation Unit, the United Nations Development Program, the Royal Police Academy and the Institute of Judicial and Legal Studies, and the program dealt with 50 topics during nine events, in which a group of national and international experts occur, with a rate of 80% of Bahraini experts, and 30% for women speakers, indicating that the total participants in the activities of the training program from all concerned authorities have reached about 900 participants. The program concluded many outputs, including the continuation of the appropriate training for those charged with enforcing and applying the law on practical problems in criminal cases, to achieve the Kingdom’s future vision to upgrade human rights, and work to achieve the goals of the national human rights plan for the Kingdom of Bahrain (2022-2026), especially with regard to developing the roles of national protection and reformist protection mechanisms.
