LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Released last November, the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry report catalogued dozens of problems with Bahrain's legal system and security forces. According to the report, prisoners were routinely held incommunicado and denied access to their lawyers and families. According to groups like Amnesty International, torture was commonplace and military courts convicted hundreds of people in trials which did not meet basic standards of due process.

The Bahrain government says that it has fulfilled most of the report's suggestions for fixing those problems. "A lot of the major, major ones have been implemented, and you have a lot of them with the ministry of interior, the ministry of justice," Abdelaziz bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, an official from Bahrain's information affairs authority says.

But rights groups and lawyers frequently complain about the government's handling of cases.
 
One frightening example" 16-year-old Ali al-Singace was found tied up and half-naked in a garage in Sanabis, just outside the Bahraini capital. He told neighbors that he'd been beaten, stabbed and sexually assaulted by a group of men, and filed a police report later that afternoon.

Singace was back at the police station days later, but this time as a suspect, not a victim. Prosecutors accused him of filing a false police report. He was accused of inflicting knife wounds on himself, a conclusion attributed to a government doctor who conducted a medical examination.

". we tried to have him examined again, to have another doctor review his case, and they refused the request," Faten al-Haddad, Singace's lawyer says.

Bahraini rights groups say that the case raises new questions about the government's willingness to reform its legal system. Singace says he has been abducted several times before, because he refused to work as a police informant. "The police didn't explain how he managed to tie himself up," one activist said archly.

A new report from Human Rights Watch, released on Wednesday, concludes that Bahrain's government has ignored "critical recommendations" from the report, notably the ones dealing with "accountability for torture and relief for people wrongly imprisoned."

"Hundreds of people remain behind bars solely for speaking out and demanding a change of government," Joe Stock, the deputy Middle East director at HRW says. "And it seems that no high-ranking officials have been investigated for their roles in rampant torture or unlawful killings."

Bahrain says it has made progress to curtail "widespread" torture committed by the Bahraini security forces, partly by issuing a new code of conduct, and partly by installing new closed-circuit video cameras in police stations. The interior ministry last week took journalists on a guided tour of the police station in Hoora, a busy neighborhood in the capital, where officers were eager to show off interrogation rooms recently fitted with the recording equipment.

"There are cameras all over the police station," Ghazi al-Eisan says, the head of operations for the capital governorate, "so from the moment someone enters the police station, they are on camera."

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