Officials bar rights activist from leaving Bahrain

Bahraini authorities have prevented a human rights activist from traveling abroad in the latest restrictions imposed by the ruling Aal-e Khalifah regime on the movement of political dissidents.

Deputy secretary general of the European-Bahraini Organization for Human Rights, Fatima al-Halwaji, was stopped at the airport on Wednesday. It was not clear where she was heading. 

Authorities informed her that she could not travel abroad based on an order issued by the public prosecutor’s office, Arabic-language Lualua television network reported.

The order read that Halwaji had been slapped with a travel ban on charges of “spreading false news through social media networks,” it said.

It came four days after Bahrain’s Unitary National Democratic Assemblage said officials had prevented human rights activist Monzer al-Khor from leaving the country through the King Fahd Causeway, which connects Bahrain to Saudi Arabia.

Enas Oun, head of the Monitoring and Documentation Department at the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), was also prevented from attending a human rights workshop in Tunisia on August 22.

In July, lawyer Mohammad al-Tajer, president of the Bahraini Transparency Association Sharaf al-Moussawi, and Zeinab Khamis of Bahrain Human Rights Society were barred from leaving the country.

SS