WRITTEN EVIDENCE SUBMITTED BY ALQST FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, BAHRAIN INSITUTE FOR RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY (BIRD), FAIRSQUARE

 

(TRUK0127)

 

Summary

 

●         Arab states which are important strategic partners of the British government - Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) - carry out acts of transnational repression against human rights defenders, political dissidents, and other actual or perceived opponents in the UK.

●         There has been an increase in cases in recent years, partly because human rights and political activity has become more difficult and dangerous inside these states, and so is increasingly carried out from outside.

●         States use various methods of transnational repression, including: intimidation and harassment; digital surveillance; reprisals against relatives located in victims’ home countries; and charges in absentia.

●         People from these states reporting incidents are advised to contact the police. However, meaningful action by police is rare. Meanwhile, civil servants and diplomats are reluctant to engage with what they see as primarily questions for law enforcement.

●         The close commercial, political and security relationships these states enjoy with the UK makes the British response to cases of transnational repression particularly cautious. This risks victims losing trust in the British system to take the threats to them seriously. It may also have implications for British nationals detained arbitrarily by these governments.

●         Some activists have valid concerns that political considerations are affecting their citizenship applications.

●         It is essential that the government takes a consistent approach to the risk of transnational repression, regardless of the strength or otherwise of its relationship with the perpetrating state.

 

About this submission

 

  1. This submission is made jointly by the UK-based organisations FairSquare, ALQST for Human Rights and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD). FairSquare is a human rights research and advocacy group established in 2019, with a focus on political repression in the Middle East. ALQST for Human Rights is an independent NGO established in 2014 for the purpose of defending and promoting human rights in Saudi Arabia. BIRD is a non-profit organisation founded in 2013 to promote human rights, justice and democracy in Bahrain. All three organisations have experience of supporting victims of transnational repression in the UK, or experiencing it directly.

 

  1. We aim in this submission to address the experience of UK-based nationals of certain Arab states - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE and Egypt - in relation to the inquiry’s questions 3, 10 and 11.

 

Recommendations

 

  1. It is essential that the government takes a consistent approach to the risk of transnational repression, regardless of the strength or otherwise of its relationship with the perpetrating state.

 

  1. Specifically we recommend that the government should:

○         Create a clear point of contact for all individuals experiencing transnational repression - whichever country is the perpetrator - to access advice and support.

○         Encourage individuals to report all potentially relevant incidents to this point of contact - regardless of whether they would be of interest to law enforcement or not - for monitoring and analysis purposes.

○         Provide transparent feedback to victims of transnational repression, through this point of contact, where diplomatic measures have been taken in response to their case reports.

○         Provide training to police forces on states which are known to use transnational repression, to ensure complainants are taken seriously when bringing cases forward.

○         Report to parliament annually on incidents of transnational repression in the UK and efforts by the Home Office, FCDO and other agencies to address it.

○         Ensure that Home Office procedures exclude the possibility of citizenship applications being affected by political considerations or diplomatic representations by other states.

 

Question 3: Methods employed by states

 

  1. In the past decade, states such as Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE drastically reduced the space for domestic free expression and dissent: they carried out arbitrary arrests of activists, journalists, lawyers and opposition leaders; they introduced counter-terrorism and cyber-crime laws limiting fundamental freedoms; and they targeted civil society with spyware. Following this, a new arena of political contestation emerged in countries such as the UK, with exiled citizens using political freedoms to advocate and organise.

 

  1. Despite the increasing power and influence of Gulf states in particular, these governments are highly conscious of their reputations in Western capitals, retaining some of the world’s biggest PR agencies to manage their images in London and the United States. In this light, human rights defenders and critics engaging with the British Parliament, international media, and UN human rights system are a threat. While there is a lack of precise data because so many instances go unreported, our experience suggests that there has been an increase in cases involving these states in recent years. This may dissuade other UK residents from these countries from public advocacy and political engagement, creating a “chill factor”, threatening freedom of expression in the UK, and shielding these states from much-needed scrutiny.

 

  1. Cases take a variety of forms including: intimidation and harassment, either in-person or remotely; digital surveillance; reprisals against relatives located in victims’ home countries; and charges in absentia. Examples of cases targeting UK residents are provided below. Where these cases involve individuals with a connection to the submitting organisations, we note this.

 

In-person intimidation and harassment by unknown persons

  1. Saudi Arabian nationals have been targeted by acts of harassment by unknown individuals on British soil, seemingly in connection with their work on human rights or political opposition. One prominent Saudi Arabian human rights defender (the founder of ALQST for Human Rights) recounts the following non-exhaustive selection of incidents from recent years:

○         In 2021 he found a large knife in his front garden shortly after receiving a sinister message on Twitter featuring a knife emoji alongside the word “soon” in Arabic;

○         An unknown woman approached his home and intrusively questioned his wife about his political activities;

○         An unknown man approached his wife and children in the park, and offered to facilitate his return to Saudi Arabia; and

○         He received a phone call from a Saudi Arabian number, in which the caller demonstrated knowledge of a private meeting he had attended in the UK that took place with no phones in the room, suggesting that the meeting may have been physically surveilled.

 

  1. In 2018, a Saudi Arabian activist reported that two men assaulted him in the street in central London, shortly after he posted a picture showing his location on social media. Video footage showed the men - one wearing a wired earpiece - attacking the activist in question.

 

Threats and intimidation through social media and phonecalls

  1. In 2023, a former Colonel in the Saudi Arabian security forces relocated to London and publicly criticised the government of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman in the media and online, sharing details of human rights violations he had been asked to carry out. He received a barrage of threats to his personal safety, particularly from a prominent social media influencer that he believes to have been acting on behalf of the Saudi state, and who offered a bounty for anyone who could locate him. In July 2023 he told The Guardian that he was receiving an average of 50 threats a week. He told the Middle East Eye that he declined an invitation to meet the Saudi Interior Minister at the Saudi Embassy in March 2023.

 

  1. A Saudi Arabian woman who posted online in support of women’s rights and subsequently fled to the UK has told journalists that almost every day she receives death threats which state that “they will poison me and send people loyal to their homeland to kill me at any cost, so that no one will imitate me”.

 

  1. After an Egyptian human rights defender based in the UK published information that was politically sensitive for the Egyptian government in 2024, state-aligned media publicly smeared him by accusing him of having links to terrorist organisations and spreading misinformation. Subsequently he received a threatening call from a well-known powerful figure linked to the government, warning him that he was “not far from reach even abroad”.

 

Digital surveillance and hacking

  1. Gulf states are prolific users of commercially available spyware and have used them extensively against critics and human rights activists. In 2021, the Guardian reported that the UAE was believed to be the principal user of the NSO Group’s Pegasus application in the UK between 2017 and 2019, with exiled UAE dissidents and activists appearing to be targets. The number of a former director of ALQST for Human Rights, an Emirati national who died in 2021, appeared on a list of numbers selected by NSO Group clients, as did that of BIRD’s Bahraini director of advocacy. Saudi Arabian nationals in the UK have also been the victims of digital surveillance, according to highly credible investigations.

 

Reprisals against relatives

  1. The family of a Bahraini activist (the director of advocacy at BIRD) has been repeatedly targeted by authorities in Bahrain in reprisal for his legitimate human rights work. In 2017, his mother-in-law, his wife’s cousin, and his brother-in-law were given prison sentences ranging between a month and ten years. In an opinion published in 2018, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that the three were arbitrarily detained, that they “were deprived of their liberty, interrogated and prosecuted for their family ties” with the activist, and that these were “acts of reprisals”. The same activist’s sister was detained in Bahrain after he protested against King Hamad’s attendance at the Royal Windsor Horse Show in 2017. In 2018, while in prison, his mother-in-law was hospitalised, reporting torture, shortly after he briefed parliamentarians ahead of a House of Commons debate. In 2024, UN experts expressed “alarm” after his brother-in-law was detained for more than a month with no charge, saying that “these measures apparently aim to intimidate and impair the human rights activities” of the UK-based activist, who had just participated in a UN Human Rights Council session.

 

Charges in absentia

  1. In July 2024, Egyptian prosecutors referred to trial a UK-based human rights researcher, who has worked with Human Rights Watch, the Middle East Democracy Center and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with “leadership of a terrorist group”. He did not receive any formal notice of the charges, which contained basic factual errors. Security forces had previously raided his family home in July 2022 and detained his father, after questioning him about his human rights and political activism overseas.

 

  1. The UK-based wife of the director of advocacy at BIRD was sentenced in absentia to a two months prison sentence in 2018 by a Bahraini court.

 

Pressure to meet embassy officials

  1. Some nationals of Gulf states have described a pattern of unsolicited contact from diplomats in London asking them to meet for discussions on their future plans, including whether they will be returning home. The purpose of such ostensibly legitimate meetings is seemingly to signal that they are being monitored, and to convince them either to return home or refrain from political activity. In some cases these are explicitly linked to processes such as passport or national ID card renewal. These engagements place pressure on people whose status in the UK depends on them having valid documents, to refrain from public advocacy or criticism.

 

Questions 10 and 11: UK government responses

 

  1. People from the Gulf and Arab states reporting incidents of transnational repression to British officials are generally advised to contact the police. In 2024, in a letter to FairSquare. a Foreign Office Minister advised an activist who had been subjected to threats from a state-linked individual in Egypt to contact the Metropolitan police if he believed he was the victim of a state-backed crime, and that, “every incident reported will help us understand more about this threat.” Foreign Office officials may advise victims of transnational repression that they cannot deal with their cases, as they are potentially criminal offences.

 

  1. However, even in cases of what seems to be very intimidating behaviour in the context of highly repressive states with a lack of respect for the rule of law, the police response may not be adequate. A Saudi Arabian human rights activist (the founder of ALQST for Human Rights, featured in para 8) suggests that the police may not understand the potential threat to his and his family’s safety. When a knife was found in a bush outside his home, the police refused to review CCTV footage in the area or to take fingerprints from the knife, telling him that “it costs money” and that “no crime has yet happened”. No further steps were taken. When he received an ominous threat online, and a colleague submitted a complaint about it, the police sent two young officers, who did not take the threat seriously, and asked sarcastic questions. Importantly, he has largely stopped reporting incidents unless they are very significant, assuming based on previous experience that they would not be investigated. Another Gulf national has reported incidents to the police simply so that they are on the record, not in the expectation of any action being taken. The Saudi colonel (para 10) who faced death threats reports that police advised him to adopt a lower profile, telling him in an email that, “the model of living you ought to emulate is that of Edward Snowdon [sic].”

 

  1. It is perhaps understandable that many cases of transnational repression may be difficult to pursue as criminal investigations: they may involve intimidation by unknown individuals, and the perpetrators may be outside the country. However, if police will only very rarely carry out full investigations, and if civil servants and diplomats are seemingly unwilling to have a substantive discussion about how they might respond diplomatically, it can leave victims effectively high and dry, with no-one to turn to.

 

  1. To our knowledge, the British government has never made a substantial public statement regarding acts of transnational repression by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or UAE. These are governments with which the British government has close relations, including providing training to their intelligence services and militaries. As a rule, the government seeks not to directly criticise these partners in public, and may tend instead to rely on their assurances. After UN experts concluded that the family of BIRD’s director of advocacy were being targeted in reprisal for his work (para 15), the British government told Parliament on repeated occasions that it had received “categorical assurances from the Bahraini authorities” that the cases were not reprisals. Gulf states may attempt to leverage the desire of the British government to attract inward investment, to avoid scrutiny. In 2024 the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia lobbied the former Foreign Secretary to intervene in a legal case brought by a UK-based dissident against the Saudi government. Saudi ministers told British officials that the case could have “implications for existing and future Saudi investment in the UK”.

 

  1. The result of British silence is that victims of transnational repression by these countries lack validation of their experience, and may lose trust in the British system to take the threats to them seriously. Some victims from these countries have concerns that British officials may take a laissez-faire approach to these partner states, assuming that they will stick to certain limits of behaviour in the UK. One told us he fears that in some cases there may even be informally negotiated “red lines” with Gulf state intelligence agencies with regard to their interactions with UK-based dissidents.

 

  1. The inability or reluctance by the UK to address transnational repression carried out against people on British soil may also have negative implications for British nationals arbitrarily detained overseas, for example in the UAE and Egypt. This is an issue about which parliamentarians have raised serious concerns. If the UK is seen as taking a permissive approach to violations of its sovereignty at home, in order not to jeopardise political and economic relations, it risks giving the green light to other governments to detain British nationals arbitrarily, in the knowledge that diplomatic or other consequences are unlikely.

 

  1. Some Gulf human rights activists in the UK have valid concerns that the British state’s close relations with their governments is affecting the UK bureaucracy’s decisions on their personal status. One Bahraini human rights activist (the director of advocacy for BIRD) who had qualified for British citizenship resorted to threatening the government with legal action after his application was delayed beyond normal limits. After a three year delay (the normal processing time is six months), he finally secured his passport in 2024. Emails he obtained showed that the delay had seemingly been caused by Foreign Office officials raising concerns with the Home Office about “the implications arising from granting him British citizenship”, despite the Home Office concluding that “there are no grounds to refuse the application”. The Home Office has separately admitted that it detained the same activist unlawfully at Gatwick in 2023, when he was returning from speaking at the UN Human Rights Council about Bahrain, and paid him compensation. The case raises questions about whether representations from the Bahraini government played any role in his detainment.

 

  1. Another human rights activist originally from a Gulf state is currently facing excessive delays to his citizenship application, and is concerned that the decision may be being held up for political reasons.
     

(Feb 2025)