Amnesty International condemns UAE's human rights record

Amnesty International condemns UAE's human rights record

In a recent in-depth report on the situation of human rights in the Middle East and North Africa, Amnesty International accuses the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of systematic practices of arbitrary detention, torture and enforced disappearance against national human rights advocates and critics.

The rights group said that it had documented many cases in which “the rights of detainees in the UAE were violated and the state security apparatus was responsible for most of these breaches", explaining that “people were arrested in the UAE without the issuance of an arrest warrant against them, held incommunicado for weeks or months, and subjected to torture or other types of abuse.”

“The UAE authorities continued to arbitrarily arrest and prosecute peaceful dissidents, and suppress any source of criticism to the government,” the report continues, noting that “dozens of prisoners of conscience are still held in extremely poor conditions.” Ahmed Mansoor, an Emirati human rights activist currently serving a 10-year sentence is being kept in an isolation cell without even a bed to sleep on. 

Amnesty further condemns the continued participation of the UAE in the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen, which has become the world's worst humanitarian crises. Since the start of the conflict in 2015, the coalition has been implicated in war crimes and other serious violations of international law on several occasions. Most recently, Abu Dhabi was accused of illegally supplying warring militias in Yemen with weapons and military equipment.

Besides Yemeni militias, the UAE has been supporting the forces of Khalifa Haftar, who has committed serious violations of international law in Libya. The report points out that “the UAE provided Haftar forces with weapons and carried out air raids in its favour using drones, in violation of the United Nations arms embargo in Libya.”

 

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