Author Archive

Isabel Woodford

Isabel Woodford is an MPhil Candidate in Development at the University of Oxford.

Last week, three men were executed. Three men whose fate I had grown to care about from the shelter of a media centre in North London. Almost a year ago to the day, I began researching and producing a documentary that investigated the imprisonment of three men in a Bahraini jail: 21 year old Ali al-Singace, Abbas al-Samea, 27, and Sami Mushaima, 42. They were at the heart of a story that cried for diplomatic intervention, with overwhelming evidence that suggested they had been arrested, in reality, not for the killing of three policemen in a bomb blast in 2014, but for the crime of opposing their government. It was hard not to grimace at the pictures of the wounds …