The king’s risky move

IT WAS both a humiliation and a triumph. Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa listened quietly as a litany of human-rights abuses committed by his security forces was read out. It was a devastating and embarrassing indictment of his security forces' behaviour. But it was also a vindication of his claim that it would be an independent and genuine attempt to get at the truth, thereby undermining his opponents' insistence that it would be a worthless document.

Five months after the king appointed a panel of human-rights experts to examine events in Bahrain earlier this year, when anti-government protests by the majority Shias across the Sunni-ruled kingdom prompted a brutal crackdown, the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry has laid bare the scale of abuse. Cherif Bassiouni, a former war-crimes lawyer for the UN who chaired the five-person panel, left little to the imagination as he described the systematic torture of prisoners, nearly all of them Shias, along with a “culture of impunity” in Bahrain's security forces.