The UAE94, a group of human rights defenders (HRDs), attorneys, judges, teachers, professors, and students who peacefully pushed for political reform, were arrested and detained 10 years ago. Their enforced abduction, torture, and false conviction for plotting a coup against the government in a trial marked by flagrant abuses of due process was a watershed event for human rights and civic liberties in the UAE. It drove the country down an increasingly restrictive road, leaving Ahmed Mansoor as the only human rights campaigner publicly functioning in the UAE until his detention in 2017. In the following years, the UAE’s indiscriminate use of imprecise laws, targeted monitoring, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and torture has chilling effects on peaceful human rights work and the practice of basic civic liberties.
UAE authorities rely on torture in consolidating this oppressive climate. The key patterns of torture that emerge are: the use of arbitrary arrest, detention, and enforced disappearances to commit torture with impunity; the punishment and further torture of those who dare to speak out about their detention conditions; and the complicity of companies and the international community in the systematic perpetration of torture in the UAE.
However, the UAE’s continued impunity for torture is more than simply a domestic concern. It is based on, and is supported by, the international community’s readiness to turn a blind eye. This complicity was most recently demonstrated by French President Emmanuel Macron’s December 2021 visit to the UAE, during which he met with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, and signed a multibillion-euro deal for the sale of fighter planes and combat helicopters to the UAE.
Furthermore, despite human rights organizations’ tireless efforts to alert members of the General Assembly to Al-Raisi’s key role in the torture and degrading treatment of detained human rights defenders and other prisoners of conscience, Major General Ahmed Nasser Al-Raisi was elected as President of the International Criminal Police Organisation (INTERPOL) in November 2021.
Along with urging states and corporations to abandon their “business as usual” approach to the UAE while torture and other grave human rights violations continue unabated, we argue states and organizations to take legal actions such as universal jurisdiction in combating the culture of impunity that sustains and supports torture perpetrators in the UAE. This would send a strong message to the authorities that they are not above the law and that they will face consequences for their acts.
