Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answers by Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon on 26 July 2017 (HL844 and HL845), 8 January (HL4425 and HL4427), 8 May (HL7180 and HL7183), 11 May (HL7811), 18 June (HL8316), 25 June (HL8576 and HL8577), 4 July (HL8871), 25 July (HL9605), 23 October (HL10580, HL10581, HL10582, HL10583, HL10584, and HL10585), and 5 November (HL10908, HL10909, HL10910, and HL10961), what assessment they have made of the UN Committee against Torture’s concluding remarks on the second and third periodic reports of Bahrain, published on 29 May 2017, and its concerns that the Bahraini bodies to which people may file complaints about torture or ill-treatment are “not independent”, have “little or no effect”, and provide “negligible information regarding the outcome of their activities”; and, in the light of those concerns, why they “encourage those with concerns about treatment in detention to report these to the relevant human rights oversight bodies”.

We believe that the oversight bodies in Bahrain, including the Ministry of Interior Ombudsman, are structured so that they are able to operate independently from the organisations that they oversee. While these bodies still have more to do, they have already demonstrated their abilities including through the prosecution of more than 70 police officers accused of human rights abuses.