The MENA Prison Forum (MPF), medico international, and HAU Hebbel am Ufer, in collaboration with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), are pleased to invite you to the second event of the series “Understanding Prison: MENA Prison Forum in Berlin."

The event will take place at 19:00 on 25 February 2025 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU1) in Berlin.

For tickets, please visit: https://hebbel-am-ufer-tickets.reservix.de/p/reservix/event/2350420?_locale=en 

Performance and presentation “ISIS Prisons Museum” / With Robin Yassin-Kassab, Gary Snyder, Talal Al-Shuweimi & Anwar Al-Bunni / Directed by Ayham Al-Agha / Arabic and English with simultaneous translation into German, English and Arabic

The “ISIS Prisons Museum” is a virtual museum that uses digital technologies to document the sites of Islamic State (IS) crimes in Syria and Iraq and analyse them in the context of regional history. The online museum will also be made accessible in exhibitions to raise public awareness of the crimes of IS, enable prosecution and support survivors and families of the disappeared. The creators are presenting the virtual museum, which went online in October 2024 after years of forensic work, for the first time in Germany.

Talk “From Abu Ghraib to Sednaya: A conversation about prison and accountability in the MENA region” / Wolfgang Kaleck in conversation with Katja Maurer / German with simultaneous English and Arabic translation

What legal approaches are there to human rights violations in prisons? The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) is diving deep into this question, including in the Middle East. Back in 2006, German human rights lawyer and current ECCHR Secretary General Wolfgang Kaleck filed charges against the then US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and other Pentagon executives – for war crimes and human rights violations in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. In 2019, the ECCHR supported 29 torture survivors from Syria in a high-profile case in Koblenz in the so-called Al-Khatib trial. This chapter of torture in Syrian prisons ended with the fall of Assad's rule in December 2024, and since then, the debate about victims and perpetrators and the demand for accountability rages on. This interview looks back while also looking ahead in the reappraisal of the crimes in Syria.

The MENA Prison Forum, an initiative of UMAM Documentation and Research (UMAM D&R), is dedicated to researching prison culture in the MENA region. It is an interdisciplinary international network that includes former prisoners, filmmakers, academics, and activists from various countries around the region. Together with medico international and HAU, the MPF is organizing a series of events in Berlin to promote critical and continual engagement on carceral conditions and dynamics in the MENA region.