MINORITY RIGHTS Members of ethnic, religious and other minorities continued to face repression in a number of countries, exacerbated by the increased political polarization that both fuelled and flowed from the armed conflicts that dominated the region. In Saudi Arabia, the authorities continued to clamp down on the Shi’a minority, detaining and imprisoning Shi’a activists and executing a leading Shi’a cleric. In Iran, the authorities imprisoned scores of peaceful activists belonging to ethnic minorities, and maintained a raft of discriminatory restrictions that denied members of religious minorities equitable access to employment, education, political office and exercise of their economic, social and cultural rights. In Egypt, Coptic Christians, Shi’a Muslims and Baha’is faced continuing discrimination in law and practice and a new law restricted the building and repair of churches. In Kuwait, the authorities continued to withhold citizenship from more than 100,000 Bidun long-term residents, who remained stateless and unable to access a range of state services. RIGHTS OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER AND INTERSEX PEOPLE LGBTI people faced arrest and imprisonment on charges of “debauchery” or “indecency”, and persecution under laws criminalizing consensual same-sex sexual relations in Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Morocco and Tunisia. IMPUNITY A heavy shroud of impunity prevailed, under which parties to armed conflicts perpetrated war crimes, other grave violations of international law and gross human rights abuses. Elsewhere, state authorities committed unlawful killings, torture and other human rights violations without accountability. In some cases, impunity continued for crimes committed decades ago. In Algeria, the authorities continued to protect state forces responsible for serious crimes in the 1990s by criminalizing calls for justice, thus 54 turning the law on its head. In Morocco, 10 years after the landmark Truth and Equity Commission reported on decades of grave violations, state policy still firmly shielded from justice those responsible. Israel’s government agreed to pay compensation to the families of Turkish nationals killed by Israeli soldiers in 2010 but failed to ensure accountability either for the extensive war crimes and other grave violations of international law that Israeli forces committed during recent armed conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon or for unlawful killings, torture and other violations that Israeli soldiers and security officials continued to commit against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The government of Palestine ratified Rome Statute amendments giving the International Criminal Court jurisdiction over the “crime of aggression”. Neither the Palestinian government nor the Hamas de facto administration in Gaza took steps to ensure accountability for crimes committed by Palestinian armed groups in previous conflicts, including indiscriminate rocket and mortar attacks on Israel and summary killings of alleged “collaborators”. In Egypt, the security forces continued to commit serious violations with impunity, targeting alleged supporters of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and other critics and opponents for arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and torture. An amendment to the Police Authority Law prohibited security forces from “ill-treating citizens”. But the authorities took no serious steps to hold members of the security forces accountable for unlawful killings and other serious violations committed during years of turmoil since the popular uprising in 2011. In Bahrain, the international condemnation sparked in 2011 by the authorities’ heavily abusive response to popular protests led the government to create, and thereafter to vaunt, official mechanisms mandated to investigate alleged human rights violations by the security forces and ensure accountability. These continued to function in 2016, albeit not in a sufficiently adequate and effective manner, and a small number of low-ranking Amnesty International Report 2016/17