Asma, a Bahraini citizen who has been granted refugee status and is residing in France, gave us an overview of her story which began when she was a student activist at Bahrain Polytechnic where she organized and participated in student protests and peaceful political movements that started in February 2011. For these activities, she was expelled from the institution in the last year of her studies. She also witnessed the marginalization of others who participated in protests against the government, demanding political and social reforms, including equality of participation in the workings of the government. These people were dismissed from their jobs and were targeted via posts on social media for arrest for participating in anti-government protests.

At the young age of 20, in June of that same year (2011), and after some of her family members found themselves arrested and even some of whom “disappeared”, Asma went on a hunger strike to draw attention to the unjust plight of many in Bahrain and raised her profile by bringing a letter addressed to the United Nations Secretary General to the United Nations offices in Bahrain. She and two of her compatriots were arrested for this. Asma had used Twitter to communicate her plight, catching the eye of Helen Clark, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand who advocated for her release.

Since 2011, Asma has been a Human Rights Defender and has been working with different local and international human rights organizations, most recently as an advocacy officer with the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) which is a non-profit, non-governmental organization, registered with the Bahraini Ministry of Labor and Social Services since July 2002. Despite an order by the Bahraini authorities in November 2004 to close down, BCHR is still functioning after gaining broad local and international support for its struggle to promote human rights in Bahrain. The vast majority of BCHR operations are carried out in Bahrain, while a small office in exile, founded in 2011, is maintained in Copenhagen, Denmark, to coordinate the international advocacy program. For more than 18 years, BCHR has carried out numerous projects, including advocacy, digital security trainings, workshops, seminars, research, media campaigns and reporting to UN human rights mechanisms and international NGOs. BCHR has also participated in many regional and international conferences and workshops in addition to testifying in national parliaments across Europe, the European Parliament, and the US Congress. BCHR has received funding from the Norwegian Human Rights Fund (NHRF), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Sigrid Rausing Trust (SRT), CIVICUS, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) and the Digital Defenders Partnership (DDP). BCHR has received numerous international awards for its efforts to promote democracy and human rights in Bahrain, such as the Rafto Award, the Baldwin Medal of Liberty, among others.

Asma is based in France, where she does advocacy work and carries out research to promote change and tries to be the “voice for the voiceless, for isn’t that what advocacy is all about?”. Some examples of her work done in collaboration with other advocates includes having an impact that ended the awful torture situation that was common in Bahraini prisons, helping in the release of many prisoners of conscience from imprisonment, and also in providing adequate medical care for prisoners.

Asma tries to focus her effort into realizing basic human rights in her country: rights like freedom of expression, which is almost totally restricted in Bahrain. Asma engages with the United Nations in Geneva and reports closely to its mechanisms and collaborates with many organizations, among them, Amnesty International, the FIDH (Paris) and Front Line Defenders (Ireland).
Her mission is to encourage and support individuals and groups to be proactive in the protection of their own and others’ rights; to struggle to promote democracy and human rights in accordance with international norms; to document and report on human rights violations in Bahrain; and to carry on advocacy to influence international policies according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Some of her recent work was producing a thematic report to evaluate the situation of women’s rights in Bahrain: for example, Bahraini women cannot pass on their nationality to their children in Bahrain. Her works sometimes include the GCC States*.

*Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), political and economic alliance of six Middle Eastern countries—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman.

Asma speaks 6 languages fluently and often translates among them. She wants to speak Turkish fluently, “that’s my future project”, she told us. She has been in France for almost five years and has taken time to learn French and settle into her new home. She lived briefly in New Zealand for her studies and also in Switzerland. She is happy in France; it is her “home away from home.” She finds she “is enough for here and also enough for there. A global citizen!”