Zainab Al-Khawaja

human rights activist

Zainab al-Khawaja is a Bahraini human rights activist and pro-democracy campaigner, and a participant in the 2011-12 Bahraini uprising. She rose to prominence while tweeting about the 2011 protests under the name angry arabiya, as well as for supporting her father’s hunger strike in prison. Her father, the pro-democracy movement leader Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, is serving a life sentence in Bahrain for participating in the 2011 uprising.

Zainab has been arrested by the Bahraini authorities a total of eleven times. She spent most of 2013 in jail. She was arrested for the final time in March 2016 and imprisoned together with her infant son. Charges brought against her included "destroying public property" after she tore up a picture of the King of Bahrain. She was released on humanitarian grounds in May 2016, and currently lives in exile in Denmark.

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