Nabeel Rajab

Nabeel Rajab is the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. A longtime human rights defender, he has been beaten and imprisoned several times for his advocacy, which stretches back to his youth, when he was forced to switch schools after writing pro-justice slogans on school walls. It was not until Bahrain's 1990s uprising that Rajab entered organised human rights work. During this time, he worked clandestinely and was arrested several times.

Since the accession of Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa to the Bahraini throne and the attendant liberalization, he has defended human rights more openly, but he has nonetheless received threats from the government and was beaten in 2005 in a well-documented case. He helped lead the Arab Spring protests in Bahrain, which were violently suppressed. While Rajab was imprisoned for under an hour, he was subsequently prevented from traveling abroad for several months.

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