Yusuf al-Jamri had every reason to believe he was safe when he arrived in Britain in October 2017 and applied for asylum protection.
The 41-year-old Bahraini activist had experienced sporadic periods of detention and torture beginning at the age of 16, when he was first held for five months without charge. In 2011, during the Arab spring, al-Jamri faced regular questioning and harassment by authorities because of his work as a protest organiser. But it wasn’t until 2017 – after multiple episodes of detention; alleged torture by Bahrain’s notorious intelligence agency, the National Security Apparatus; sexual assault; interrogations; and threats of rape – that he decided to flee Bahrain with his family.
