Last week, 19 members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter to Bahrain’s king, calling for the release of prominent activist Nabeel Rajab, who was serving a three-month jail sentence for comments he made on Twitter.  As have written previously, the Bahraini government has cracked down harshly on dissidents, allegedly utilizing tools such as FinFisher and arresting activists on trumped-up charges.

Today, Rajab was sentenced to three years in prison for a set of three different charges relating to his participation in protests.  Rajab is the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), the director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights (GCHR), and the vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). In a statement today, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights wrote:

The Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) and the Gulf Center for Human Rights (GCHR) condemn in the strongest terms the sentence passed today against the detained human rights defender Nabeel Rajab by the Bahraini government on charges related to protesting.

EFF joins the BCHR, GCHR, and other human rights and civil liberties groups—including fellow IFEX members Index on Censorship, Freedom House, and the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information—in denouncing Rajab’s sentence in the strongest possible terms and calling once again for his unconditional release.