The assessment comes from UK peer Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat, during a House of Lords sports-washing debate held in the chamber on Thursday. He says it was prompted by Domenicali failing to engage.
Scriven is also a vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Groups on Democracy and Human Rights in the Gulf and has repeatedly spoken out against F1 racing and conducting testing in Bahrain.
In the Lords debate, Scriven cited four protesters who he says were “arrested, threatened, verbally abused” after they held a protest near to the Bahrain circuit during the 2023 grand prix.
This came despite Domenicali reassuring that “individuals should be allowed to protest against and criticise our event without intimidation or reprisals”.
It is said these four citizens were then subject to “harassment” in 2024, including the raiding of family houses, police summonses and, in one case, an individual was “tortured and interrogated while blindfolded” in an arrest that was “strategically timed to coincide with the F1 testing… to silence all protest”.
Source: Autosport