Al-Jazeerah History
Archives
Mission & Name
Conflict Terminology
Editorials
Gaza Holocaust
Gulf War
Isdood
Islam
News
News Photos
Opinion
Editorials
US Foreign Policy (Dr. El-Najjar's Articles)
www.aljazeerah.info
|
|
UAE Government Should Reveal Whereabouts of
Academic, Nasser Bin Ghaith, Stop 'Free Speech' Detentions and Conventions
By Human Rights Watch
Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, August 24, 2015
|
|
Nasser Bin Ghaith |
|
UAE: Reveal Whereabouts of Academic
Spate of “Free Speech” Detentions, Convictions
The United Arab Emirates authorities should immediately reveal the
whereabouts of Nasser bin Ghaith, an academic detained on August 19, 2015,
and being held at an undisclosed location, Human Rights Watch said today.
The authorities should allow bin Ghaith access to a lawyer and contact with
his family. The circumstances of his detention are consistent with previous
cases of arbitrary detention by state security officials whom
former and
current detainees have accused of torture.
UAE security
authorities have neither acknowledged nor given any reason for their
detention of bin Ghaith. He spent seven months in prison in 2011 on charges
of “publicly insulting” top UAE officials. He recently criticized the
Egyptian security forces’
mass killing of demonstrators in Cairo’s Rab’a Square in 2013 after the
ouster of Egypt’s elected Muslim Brotherhood government. The UAE is a key
ally of Egypt’s current government, and since 2012 UAE authorities have
arbitrarily detained scores of people suspected of having links to the
Muslim Brotherhood.
“It appears that Nasser bin Ghaith has once again
fallen victim to the UAE authorities’ intolerance of criticism and fear of
free speech,” said
Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “It is
extremely worrying that bin Ghaith’s wellbeing rests with a state security
apparatus with a reputation for torture and disregard of the law.”
Local sources told Human Rights Watch that 13 security officers in civilian
clothes arrested bin Ghaith in the Armed Forces Officers Club in Abu Dhabi
on the afternoon of August 19. They took him to Dubai, where they searched
his home and confiscated items that included electronic memory sticks.
His whereabouts are unknown and Human Rights Watch has not been able to
speak with his family members. People who are known to have spoken with
rights groups are at serious risk of arbitrary detention and imprisonment in
the UAE. The UAE’s 2014
counterterrorism law provides for the death penalty for people whose
activities are found to “undermine national unity or social peace.”
In 2014, the Federal Supreme Court sentenced Osama al-Najer, an Emirati
whose father, Hossain, is serving an 11-year sentence after an unfair trial,
to three years in jail on charges that included “communicating with external
organizations to provide misleading information.”
Analysis of bin
Ghaith’s Twitter feed reveals that on August 13 and 14, the anniversary of
the Rab’a Square
massacre, bin Ghaith
made
three
comments that could be construed as critical of the Egyptian
authorities’ failure to hold anyone accountable for the deaths of protesters
at the hands of the security forces. At the time of his arrest in 2011, bin
Ghaith was an economist and university lecturer at Sorbonne Abu Dhabi.
In the last three months, UAE media have reported that seven people have
been sentenced to prison for speech-related offenses and that another is
facing trial.
On May 18, the Federal Supreme Court found
five Qatari nationals guilty of “attempting to ruin the reputation of
the state by spreading insulting images of the country.” Four were tried and
convicted in absentia, but the other, Hamad al-Hammadi, was sentenced to 10
years in prison.
On May 25, local media
reported that the Federal Supreme Court sentenced a UAE national, Ahmed
Abdulla al-Wahdi, to 10 years in prison for “creating and running a social
media account that insults the UAE’s leadership and the country’s
institutions.”
On June 29, local media
reported that the Federal Supreme Court found that Nasser al-Junaibi, a
UAE national, had “spread rumors and information that harmed the country”
and “insulted government entities,” and sentenced him to three years in
prison. Newspaper
reports said that the court-appointed lawyer assigned to the case
refused to attend a trial session on May 4.
In August 2012, Human
Rights Watch
reported that the harassment of leading defense lawyers was making it
nearly impossible for detained peaceful dissidents to get access to a
lawyer, and the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and
lawyers has
expressed concern over “reports of surveillance, harassment, pressure
and threats being exerted on lawyers” in the UAE, and has said that “lawyers
should not be identified with their clients or their clients’ cause as a
result of discharging their professional functions.”
On August 24,
the Federal Supreme Court will try 41 people under a 2014
counterterrorism law on charges of setting up a terrorist organization.
The authorities have not disclosed details of the case or the identities of
the defendants, although local media
quoted Attorney General Salem Saeed Kubaish as saying that the
defendants “set up and ran a terrorist group called Shabab Al Manara.” The
UAE’s counterterrorism law enables the courts, which a UN expert described
as being “under
the de facto control” of the government, to convict peaceful government
critics as terrorists and sentence them to death.
The convictions of
69 defendants in a mass trial of 94 government critics on July 2, 2013, were
based on a
fundamentally unfair trial and violated the rights of free expression
and association of many of those accused. The trial was marred even before
it started by violations of fair trial standards, including the denial of
legal assistance during lengthy pretrial incommunicado detention, and
allegations of torture that the court failed to investigate adequately.
***
For more Human Rights Watch reporting on the UAE, please
visit:
http://www.hrw.org/middle-eastn-africa/united-arab-emirates
For
more information, please contact:
In Florence, Nicholas McGeehan (English): +44-751-395-6155 (mobile); or
mcgeehn@hrw.org. Twitter: @Ncgeehan
In New York, Sarah Leah Whitson (English): +1-718-362-0172 (mobile); or
whitsos@hrw.org. Twitter: @sarahleah1
In Washington, DC, Ahmed Benchemsi (English, French, Arabic):
+1-929-343-7973 (mobile); or
benchea@hrw.org. Twitter: @AhmedBenchemsi
***
Share this article with your facebook friends
|
|
|