periods of more than two years, placed those imprisoned in indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement, and subjected many of those released to probation periods in which they were forced to spend up to 12 hours per day in a police station, amounting to arbitrary deprivation of liberty. Saudi Arabia witnessed the promotion of Mohammed bin Salman to the role of Crown Prince in June as part of a broader re-engineering of the political landscape. In the months that followed, the authorities intensified their crackdown on freedom of expression, detaining more than 20 prominent religious figures, writers, journalists, academics and activists in one week in September. They also put human rights defenders on trial on charges related to their peaceful activism before the Specialized Criminal Court, a tribunal set up to try terrorism-related cases. At the end of the year, despite the image the palace wished to portray of a more tolerant country, the majority of Saudi Arabia’s human rights defenders were either in prison or facing grossly unfair trials. ATTACKS ON JOURNALISTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS Elsewhere, human rights advocacy and journalistic reporting, as well as criticism of official institutions, led to prosecution and imprisonment and, in some cases, smear campaigns orchestrated by the government or its supporters. In Iran, the authorities jailed scores of peaceful critics including women’s rights activists, minority rights and environmental activists, trade unionists, lawyers, and those seeking truth, justice and reparation for the mass executions of the 1980s. In Bahrain, the government arbitrarily detained human rights defenders and government critics and subjected others to travel bans or the stripping of their nationality, dissolved the independent al-Wasat newspaper and the opposition political group Waad, maintained a ban on demonstrations in the capital, Manama, and used unnecessary and excessive force to disperse protests elsewhere. In Morocco and Western Sahara, the authorities prosecuted and imprisoned a number of journalists, bloggers and activists who criticized officials or reported on human rights violations, corruption or popular protests, such as those that took place in the northern Rif region, where security forces conducted mass arrests of largely peaceful protesters, including children, and sometimes used excessive or unnecessary force. The Kuwaiti authorities imprisoned several government critics and online activists under legal provisions that criminalized comments deemed offensive to the Emir or damaging to relations with neighbouring states. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, a number of journalists and online activists were subjected to arbitrary arrest, death threats and smear campaigns, a pattern that escalated in the run-up to an independence referendum in September called by the region’s president. In Yemen, the Huthi armed group arbitrarily arrested and detained critics, journalists and human rights defenders in the capital, Sana’a, and other areas they controlled. Meanwhile, the Israeli authorities banned entry into Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories to individuals supporting or working for organizations that had issued or promoted a statement which the authorities deemed to be a call to boycott Israel or Israeli entities, including settlements, targeted both Palestinian and Israeli human rights NGOs through harassment and campaigns to undermine their work, and deployed forces that used rubbercoated metal bullets and live ammunition against Palestinian protesters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, killing at least 20 and injuring thousands. ONLINE REPRESSION Governments other than Egypt also made efforts to increase their control of expression on the internet. The State of Palestine adopted the Electronic Crimes Law in July, permitting the 56 Amnesty International Report 2017/18