Speaking Freely: Maryam Al-Khawaja

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*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Maryam Al-Khawaja is a Bahraini Woman Human Rights Defender who works as a consultant and trainer on Human Rights. She is a leading voice for human rights and political reform in Bahrain and the Gulf region. She has been influential in shaping official responses to human rights atrocities in Bahrain and the Gulf region by leading campaigns and engaging with prominent policymakers around the world.

She played an instrumental role in the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout in February 2011. These protests triggered a government response of widespread extra judicial killings, arrests, and torture, which she documented extensively over social media. Due to her human rights work, she was subjected to assault, threats, defamation campaigns, imprisonment and an unfair trial. She was arrested on illegitimate charges in 2014 and sentenced in absentia to one year in prison. She currently has an outstanding arrest warrant and four pending cases, one of which could carry a life sentence. She serves on the Boards of the International Service for Human Rights, Urgent Action Fund, CIVICUS and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy. She also previously served as Co-Director at the Gulf Center for Human Rights and Acting President of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights.

York: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your work? Maybe provide us a brief outline of your history as a free expression advocate going back as far as you’d like.

Maryam: Sure, so my name is Maryam Al-Khawaja. I’m a Bahraini-Danish human rights defender and advocate. I’ve worked in many different spaces around human rights and on many different thematic issues. Of course freedom of expression is an intricate part of nearly any kind of human rights advocacy work. And it’s one of the issues that is critical to the work that we do and critical to the civil society space because it not only affects people who live in dictatorships, but also people who live in democracies or pseudodemocracies. A lot of times there’s not necessarily an agreement around what free

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