United Arab Emirates (UAE) Legal professional Normal Hamad Saif Al Shamsi confirmed on Saturday the mass referral of 84 folks to the State Safety Court docket on expenses associated to violence and terrorism, reported Emirates Information Company (WAM), the state’s official information outlet.
Amongst the detainees are Sultan Bin Kayed Al-Qasim, Nasser Bin Ghaith, Muhammed Al-Roken and Ahmad Mansoor, a distinguished rights activist who was sentenced to 10 years in jail and fined $272,000 in 2018 for criticizing the federal government in social media posts. Officers say the detained prisoners are associated to the group of Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamic transnational group categorized as a terrorist group by the nation. Dissidents and human rights teams within the nation have criticized the arrests and mass trial as arbitrary and politically-motivated.
The referrals and trial have been first reported by the Emirates Detainees Advocacy Centre (EDAC) in December, who mentioned proceedings have been ongoing in the course of the UAE-hosted United Nations COP28 convention. WAM reviews that the investigations commenced six months previous to the referral, which prosecutors say supplied sufficient proof of the crime. Officers say that authorized illustration was given to every individual arrested.
EDAC has repeatedly condemned the trial and claimed the fees are fabricated, stating that it’s a breach of the UAE structure. It has accused the authorities of “secret classes,” of stopping attorneys from seeing a replica of the indictments and of depriving the defendants from speaking with their attorneys. It has additionally emphasized that a number of human rights organizations joined them in condemning, “the UAE authorities’ use of the felony justice system as a instrument to maintain these people behind bars and suppress peaceable criticism or any requires reform.”
Amnesty Worldwide called the trial a “shameless contempt for human rights.” Amnesty Worldwide’s Deputy Regional Director for the Center East and North Africa, Aya Majzoub, said that conducting the trial similtaneously COP28 was “supposed to ship a transparent message to the world that it’ll not tolerate the slightest peaceable dissent and that the authorities don’t have any intention of reforming the nation’s dire rights report.” Majzoub urged authorities to “instantly launch all arbitrarily detained prisoners, drop expenses in opposition to them and finish their ruthless assault on human rights and freedoms”.
WAM mentioned that the court docket has begun listening to witnesses amid the continuing trial proceedings.
Source / Picture: jurist.org
