One evening in March 2012 around 8 p.m., Egyptian video blogger Ahmed Anwar was sitting at home when he got the idea of making a short spoof film inspired by the police having just given Marwa, a famous Lebanese dancer and singer, an award.

Ahmed called his friend to come...

This Saturday Manchester United legend Denis Law is going to Bahrain to promote the 2013 Manchester United Soccer School (MUSS). Law's appearance comes just one week before the Formula One race will take place in Bahrain. "The visit is set to happen during a significant time in Bahrain's sporting calendar...

Saturday, April 6 will be exactly two years since Mahdi Abu Deeb, President of the Bahrain Teachers Association (BTA), was arrested for his part in the peaceful uprising. He was tortured, subjected to unfair military and civilian trials and is serving a five-year sentence.

Washington has been...

Cairo, Egypt - Unloved and dejected, the Egyptian policeman's lot is not a happy one. I'm on a research trip to Cairo and it's hard to see how the country's police will ever establish the trust and authority it needs for a successful transition to Egyptian democracy.

The force has...

Hiding people on the run in Bahrain is risky. Earlier this month, local press reported that a Bahraini family -- mother, father and son -- had all been sentenced to a year in prison for sheltering a wanted man for just a few days last April.

No one knows exactly...

This time last year I was in Bahrain, invited by the government to witness the publication of the report commissioned by the King of Bahrain into human rights violations earlier in 2011. There we sat, hundreds of us in an enormous room in a royal palace. The King was on...

The prospects for meaningful reform in Bahrain seem even more distant now as outlets for peaceful dissent in the Kingdom are being systematically silenced. Last week, four men were charged with the "crime of insulting his majesty the king on their personal accounts on Twitter." This week, the...

Once again, the Bahrain regime has passed on taking a meaningful decision on reform. This morning the appeal verdicts were set to be handed down in the trial of 13 of the nation's leading dissidents, including prominent activist Abdulhadi Al Khawaja. The men were initially given long sentences...

There they sit, squeezed onto two benches in Bahrain's criminal court: the 20 medics who were tortured into making false confessions. They were arrested last year after treating protestors at the Salmaniya Medical Complex and telling the world the truth about what had happened.

Their ordeal began a...

With delicious irony, the Government of Bahrain sent out a press release last week declaring that it "welcomes visits by all human rights organizations," and that its "open-door policy remains in place" on the same day it sent me a letter saying it wouldn't let me into the country.

I...

Hundreds and hundreds of us trooped into the King of Bahrain's palace on Wednesday afternoon for the presentation of the much-hyped Bassiouni report. Cherif Bassiouni, head of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) gave a 45-minute verbal summary of his 500-page report as we - and the senior members...

What's a dictatorship to do when it wants to be seen to address its own human rights crimes? It can call in the United Nations to investigate or give access to reputable international human rights organizations. Or, it can do what Bahrain has done and think of a creative alternative....

As human rights abuses persist in Bahrain, human rights defenders on the ground there are forced to take their fight for political freedom to other mediums, including Twitter. They work in the shadows, but their message is resonating around the world and drawing attention to the Bahraini government's abuses.

Unfortunately,...

Remember that photo from Tiananmen Square in 1989 where the guy with the shopping bags stands in front of the column of tanks? It's an inspirational image -- the unarmed man defying four tanks.

There are really two heroes in that picture. The man with the shopping bags and the...

The Bahraini government has some key lessons for young people participating in the nation's Arab Spring-inspired uprising -- codes of silence, promises to not participate in political freedom efforts, and limits on free speech. It's this sort of clumsy repression that exposes the reality behind the Bahrain regime's attempts to...

Standing up for human rights in Bahrain is difficult and dangerous. Dozens of medics who helped treat injured protestors Bahrain in February and March and who told international media what was happening are back in court in the coming days. Some have already had unfair trials in the military court...

Take two small island nations, each situated off the coast of a major power. Both have a history of sectarian conflict, fake democracy and misrule by monarchy. Both have a strategically important deepwater naval base. Crucially, both have a police force recruited almost exclusively from one of the sects.

Shooting at unarmed protestors isn't what U.S. government money is supposed to support, and so this week the U.S. announced it was freezing $350 million in aid to Malawi because of its violent crackdown on peaceful dissent.

Senior American official Sheila Herrling said they were "deeply disturbed" about...

One Sunday in 1994, disguised as a Belgian priest, I slipped past Senegalese soldiers guarding separatist guerrilla leaders. The rebels had been fighting a regional war to win independence for the Casamance region in the south, and had agreed to a truce and negotiations with the Senegalese government.

Head down,...

It was Lenin who said "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen". It seems like decades worth of history are suddenly happening in the Middle East, with every morning bringing some new development that would have been scarcely imaginable a few months ago.

There...