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On 17 November, the United Nations Comittee against Torture (CAT) will review the Government of Bahrain’s (GoB) adherence to Convention against Torture. Salam for Democracy and Human Rights (SALAM DHR) jointly co-submitted with ten other organisations, a report that assesses the GoB’s implementation of the convention. It decries the lack of accountability for the GoB’s longstanding, grave human rights violations.
In this reflection on his engagement with Northern Ireland, Bahrain and the experience of other states, Brian Dooley observes that state accountability for human rights violations may take decades; it may be imperfect but that it tends to come, sooner or later.
In December 2025, the University of Oslo will award to Brian Dooley the UiO’s Human Rights Award. A recognition of personal efforts and active involvement in one or more areas related to human rights issues in a broad sense, it is awarded annually during Oslo Peace Days
Salam for Democracy and Human Rights celebrates the University of Oslo’s recognition of Brian Dooley’s decades of activism, notably in respect to Bahrain. His engagement reminds states and human rights activists alike that the human rights standards incumbent upon all states are the same, whether the United Kingdom, Bahrain or any state: in terms of accountability, the obligations states face are no different.
Back in 1989, when I was a young journalist of 25 with a mass of orange hair, I reported on the murder of Northern Ireland lawyer Pat Finucane. Now, at 62 and bald, I’m still writing about this case because the full story of who ordered Finucane’s murder, and why, has never been revealed. After decades of campaigning by his family and other activists, an independent public inquiry is finally about to start.
Finucane was killed because of his work defending suspects accused of being in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the 1969-1998 Northern Ireland conflict. We know that British State agents were involved in the murder, but still do not know how far up the chain of command the order to kill him went. He was shot dead in his home in front of his wife and three small children when they were eating their Sunday dinner.
For his family, as for many others bereaved during the Northern Ireland conflict, the search for truth and accountability has been a long and painful slog.
Yet, the perseverance of these families, despite obstruction from the British authorities, shows it is possible to find some measure of accountability, with people facing trial many years after crimes have been committed.
On 30 January 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) organised a procession – a march – in Derry to protest against internment without trial. During the event, known widely as Bloody Sunday, British soldiers shot 26 unarmed people, killing 13. One man died a few months later). In September 2025, the trial began of a former British soldier -‘Soldier F’ – accused of murdering two people and attempting to murder five more at the peaceful march. Getting the case into court more than five decades later was a triumph of campaigning by the Bloody Sunday families. In October 2025, the court acquitted Soldier F citing a failure by the prosecution to meet the burden of proof required in criminal cases. The decision – in paragraph 142 – acknowledged the impact of the passage of 53 years. The judge noted that “[D]ocuments have…been destroyed or gone missing […] methods in which previous investigations have changed or were now lost […]”
And yet, even if Soldier F has been the only one ever brought to court, it remains a collective victory for all the families.
Justice, of course, was never guaranteed in this case or in others. I know from my work on Bahrain during the 2011 uprising that many people were tortured, and some killed, by the State. The chances of bringing those responsible to account years later might look remote, but Northern Ireland and other instances prove it is not impossible.
In September 2025, I was also in court in Northern Ireland with Laurence O’Neill, who was convicted in 1972 and sentenced to prison for 15 years on charges of possession of explosives. As part of my work for Human Rights First, I was on the independent panel of experts which produced the 2024 report Bitter Legacy. It included details of how O’Neill and other prisoners made confessions under torture. This report and other document have helped him secure an appeal against his 53-year-old conviction. A successful appeal won’t give him back the long years he spent in prison, but it would overturn his conviction.
Elsewhere too, belated accountability is emerging. Five months ago, a court in El Salvador convicted a former defense minister and two retired colonels of the 1982 killings of four Dutch journalists during the country’s civil war.
Earlier this year a court in Guatemala convicted and sentenced three former paramilitaries to 40 years each in prison after they were found guilty of raping six Indigenous women during the civil war in the early 1980s.
And in Northern Ireland, the families of another early 1970s massacre by British soldiers have had the truth made public. In August 1971, in the span of 36 hours in Belfast, British soldiers shot dead ten innocent people, including a 44-year-old mother of eight, and a Catholic priest who had come to the aid of an injured man. The British military lied and said they had shot gunmen. An official inquest in 2021 found all ten of those killed were entirely innocent, and the British government is now forced to pay their families damages. More importantly, the truth about what happened is finally out.
I have taken part in countless demonstrations demanding justice for Bahrainis, including overnight vigils sleeping outside Bahrain’s embassy in London (see image) to draw attention to prisoners wrongly jailed. I know that accountability is rare, but it does happen and we can try to help make it happen.
The message here isn’t that justice will always be done, that those tortured or killed will inevitably be vindicated in Bahrain and elsewhere, or that those responsible will be found guilty in court.
But it is that some perpetrators might be eventually held to account, even if it takes half a century. Perpetrators, no matter who they are, should be constantly reminded that they are not immune from justice.
Bahrain’s killers and torturers should not sleep easily. The law could, one day, catch up with them.
The examination on 17-18 November 2025 by members of the United Nations’ Committee against Torture of the Bahraini government’s accountability for its action must advance real progress, while the evidence remains relatively accessible, and while witnesses and survivors can still take part. It matters. Not just for Bahrainis, but for those in Northern Ireland, El Salvador and everywhere where survivors and the relatives of the bereaved still seek truth, justice and accountability.