Nabeel Rajab is the co-founder and former President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), Founding Director of GCHR, Deputy Secretary General of FIDH from 2012 to 2016, and a member of the Middle East advisory committee at Human Rights Watch. Comments on his Twitter account about the Saudi-led coalition airstrikes in Yemen first led to his arrest on 02 April 2015. He remained in custody until he received a royal pardon for health reasons and was thus released on 13 July 2015. Again on 13 June 2016 he was arrested for the televised interviews. During his detention in relation to the televised interviews’ investigation he was referred for trial in the criminal court in relation to the Yemeni war Tweets. He remained in detention on these charges until 28 December 2016.

However, that same day, on 28 December 2016, Rajab was immediately taken into custody on the investigation in relation to interviews dating back to 2015 and January 2016 with television networks which support the Bahraini opposition.

On 15 January 2018, the Court of Cassation upheld a two-year prison sentence for television interviews he gave in 2015 and 2016, for which he was convicted of “spreading false news and rumours about the internal situation in the Kingdom, which undermines the state’s prestige and status.”

In a separate case, on 31 December 2018, the Court of Cassation upheld Rajab’s sentence of five years in prison for “disseminating false rumours in time of war”; “offending a foreign country” – in this case Saudi Arabia; and for “insulting a statutory body.” The charges referred to comments made on Rajab’s Twitter account in March 2015 regarding alleged torture in Jaw prison and criticising the killing of civilians in the Yemen conflict by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition.

Rajab was freed on 09 June 2020 to serve the remaining three years of his sentence at home under a provision of the law allowing non-custodial sentences. He will not be allowed to get involved in any human rights activities during this period of time.