"Human rights abusers will not be held accountable in an appointed Government"

(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - The Bahraini Court of Appeal has upheld the decision to acquit two police officers accused of killing protesters, and reduced the jail term from 7 years to 6 months for another, on Sunday. This step reveals the regime’s tactic of bringing court cases for media purposes and to mislead the international community, only to later reverse decisions and allow killers to walk free, Al Wefaq said.Al Wefaq stated that this method is usually used by the regime to avoid implementing the BICI and UPR recommendations, as well as those recommended by international human rights organizations, to give a false impression of reform, whilst continuing the same policies.The sham trials that acquit killers of citizens, reveals the biased nature of the Bahraini judicial system and proves the total disregard the regime has for the blood of Bahrainis.Two police officers were accused of deliberately using firearms to kill two citizens at close range. The first police officer was convicted of shooting dead the martyr Fadhil Al-Matrook on 15th February 2011, while the other was convicted and found guilty of killing the martyr Hani Abdul-Aziz after pursuing him and then shooting him dead at close range. The court ruled to reduce his sentence from seven years to six months, which most likely means the killer can walk free now, given that those six months have already passed.Commenting on the court’s ruling in favour of the killers, Al-Wefaq’s Secretary General, Sheikh Ali Salman, stated, “The court’s acquittal of those killers proves to the whole world that ending human rights violations and holding abusers and killers to account in Bahrain is a fantasy under the current appointed government”.Salman quoted BICI Chief Mr. Cherif Bassiouni as saying, “You can’t say that justice has been done when calling for Bahrain to be a republic gets you a life sentence and the officer who repeatedly fired on an unarmed man at close range only gets seven years.” Salman added, “If he considered seven years as being an injustice, I wonder what he would say at the sentence being reduced to 6 months?”Salman made clear that the Bahrainis are certain that no justice and no accountability to human rights abusers can be achieved without an elected government. These verdicts put the international community before a moral responsibility, he added, if the international community wants human rights abusers held accountable it must pressurize the regime to form an elected government.Salman addressed those states constantly calling on the Bahraini authorities to implement the BICI and UPR recommendations saying, “After these verdicts, you can be sure that without political reform, your calls are meaningless.” Adding, “if you want real implementation for the recommendations, you must bring Bahrain to the Universal Covenant for Civil and Political Rights. But as long as you limit your efforts to just talk and not action, the regime will continue its violations of human rights and will ignore you for another two years.”“We say to the world, real political reform is the only way for the BICI and UPR recommendations to be implemented and for human rights to be respected. The people will work on bringing justice to Bahrain.”/129