The seventh year of Bahrain’s top opposition leader Sheikh Ali Salman’s arbitrary detention underscores the corrupt and the politicized nature of Bahrain’s judiciary.

Bahrain has been witnessing a peaceful protest movement since 2011 calling for democracy and human rights.

Since then, the authorities have bloodily clamp downed on dissents and committed stern human rights violations, including arbitrary detention, sham trials, enforced disappearance, revocation of citizenships, etc.

The opposition leader was taken into custody, in December 2014, allegedly on charges of “inciting disobedience and hatred in the kingdom”.

Towards the end of his four-year sentence and following a drawn-out trial marred by due process violations, Sheikh Salman was again prosecuted based on politically motivated charges related to espionage, and charged in November 2017 for “conspiring with Qatar”.

These baseless allegations are linked to an open and documented mediation, during Bahrain’s 2011 pro-democracy protests, which was originally subsidized by the United States, and with the knowledge of the Bahraini government.

The mediation resulted in preliminary communications between Manama, Qatar and the Bahraini opposition.

Bahrain’s largest opposition group Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, aka al-Wefaq, accused Manama of manipulating the mediation process after its conflict with Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, since June 2017.

Indeed, Sheikh Salman’s trial is part of a wider initiative by the Bahraini regime to silence political opposition, which reflects the deeply alarming degree prosecution of the authorities, aiming at undermining the voice of the peaceful opposition and the independent political and civil society.

Now seven years after, key allies of Bahrain, i.e. the United States and the United Kingdom, are complicit with as they have spared no effective efforts to pressure Bahrain to release Sheikh Salman and the rest of prisoners of conscience.

As well, it has not contributed to ending Manama’s systematic human rights violations and its manipulation of the row to intensify its clampdown on its critics.