United Arab Emirates

Map of the UAE.

United Arab Emirates

Demographics
Population:	9,269,612
GDP (million):	400,902
GDP p/cap.:	38,436
Life expectancy:	77.1
Development Index:	0.840

Government
Democracy Index:	2.69
Corruption Index:	6.6

More
Education Index:	0.673
Religiosity:	91

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), also known as 'Lil Saudi Arabia, is a wealthy oil-rich monarchy in the eastern Arabian Peninsula, bordering Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. As a Western-aligned nation, the UAE likes to present itself as a tolerant and forward-thinking state through efforts such as normalizing relations with Israel^[2] and holding the first "World Tolerance Summit."^[3] However, the UAE has a dreadful human rights situation and remains at its heart a cold-blooded and repressive police state that regularly conducts torture, arbitrary arrests, and a zero-tolerance policy for any political dissent.^[4]

Despite the UAE's oppression, Westerners remain dazzled by its riches and architecture, and its most famous city Dubai is among the top 10 most visited cities on earth.^[5]Ayaan Hirsi Ali seems to think of the UAE as a role model for Muslim countries in the region,^[6] which is just appalling.

The UAE was born out of an 1820 treaty between the British Empire and Gulf pirates.^[7] The effect of the treaty was to immediately turn the pirate leaders into royal families, and for the area to be known as the Trucial States, named after the truce. The British Empire provided some level of military security with the States known as a protectorate not a colony, and the States were never formally part of the empire.^[8]:173 In 1971, the protectorate status ended, and the UAE was born.

Human rights[edit]

"The Notorious U.A.E." is known for having no concept whatsoever of human rights and humanism.

Migrant labor and trafficking[edit]

It actively practices modern-day slavery and partakes in human trafficking by importing helpless workers from South and Southeast Asia, as well as its poor Arab neighbors. Out of a population of around 9 million, 58% comes from South Asia and around 16% comes from other Asian countries, with only 16% of native Emiratis living off cheap migrant labor.^[9] Migrants have no collective action rights to demand better working conditions.^[10] If workers dare to protest, they'll be immediately deported and replaced with other trafficked migrants. The UAE is also rife with child slavery, with young boys from impoverished Arabian states being forced to work as camel jockeys.^[11][12] The UAE's media is strictly censored, and any form of human rights activism will ensure that one will be incarcerated. Activist Iyad El-Baghdadi was deported for the traitorous crime of tweeting.^[13]

Freedom of expression[edit]

Behind the glitz and glamor lies a dark reality of torture and fear.

The UAE has been cracking down on internal dissent since 2011, arbitrarily arresting or "disappearing" people who speak out against the regime.^[14] In March 2017, the UAE detained Ahmed Mansoor, an award-winning human rights defender, for allegedly publishing "false information that harms national unity" on his social media accounts.^[15] His actual crime was calling for the release of another human rights activist. Authorities held Mansoor in an unknown location for more than a year with no access to a lawyer before sentencing him to a decade in prison.

Another political prisoner, Nasser bin-Ghaith, is also in prison for a ten-year sentence and is in poor health thanks to the legal system denying him access to medical care.^[16]

One of the most absurd cases was that of Ali Issa Ahmad, a British football fan who was arrested for unknowingly violating a law against 'showing sympathy to Qatar'.^[17] Ahmad was then brutally tortured with a knife while in custody, and has since allowed British media to publish images of his scars.^[18]

Prisoner abuse and torture[edit]

Like other repressive dictatorships, the UAE's authorities need little provocation to inflict torture or other abuse on political prisoners. During the Arab Spring, the UAE subjected many dozens of people to torture methods including pulling of fingernails, savage beatings, stress positions, rape, and death threats.^[19]

In 2017, their authorities were found to have horribly abused cancer-sufferer Alia Abdel Nour after shackling her to a bed and refusing to allow her medical care.^[16] She died in 2019. The UAE also likes to force its detainees to sign confessions while blindfolded and after prolonged periods of solitary confinement.^[20]

The justice system also approves of torture. For instance, when Dr. Nasser bin Ghaith told a UAE court about how he was tortured for a year without trial, the judge scoffed at him and shut off his microphone.^[21]

Women and LGBT rights[edit]

Wahhabism is prominent in the UAE,^[22] and the country has legislation based on strict interpretations of Sharia. It implements the hudud penal code which enables corporal punishments such as flogging and stoning. Homosexuals and apostasy are punishable by the death penalty, and adultery (if found out) is considered a grave sin which is applicable for non-Muslims as well. Many Western migrants are convicted for being raped.

Public relations[edit]

The UAE, unlike its big boss Saudi Arabia or rival Qatar, is known for attracting the fanfare of neocons and neoliberals alike, because of in spite of the aforementioned human rights violations. Westerners are especially attracted to Dubai, and the city is among the top 10 most visited cities on earth.^[23] This is most likely due to their cunning PR strategy in full effect, and not supporting overseas Jihadism led to much less negative coverage among the Western media, which is obsessed with terrorism.

Dubai[edit]

Dubai, an emirate/city in the UAE, has lots of money and so has tried to bootstrap itself from medieval theocracy to respected first-world-quality world citizen. This has been less than convincing in many cases.^[24]

Dubai has the highest per-capita income in the world, if you don't count all the poor people shipped in to do the actual work, and is currently home to the tallest building in the world.^[25]

Dubai was now the new "Iceland" in 2009,^[26] which didn't work out so well for the old Iceland.^[27] When will states finally learn to stop acting like hedge funds (or in Dubai's case, more like private equity)? As of 2023, there are signs that top-down directed endless building, may be reaching a crisis, particularly with Dubai's highly-visible world's largest Ferris wheel (Ain Dubai) broken and seemingly unfixable.^[28]

Royal family[edit]

Dubai's ruler since 2006 is Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is also Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE. He is something of a playboy, with a vast number of racehorses and a fondness for hanging out with Queen Elizabeth II of the UK at British racetracks, and is reportedly also an acclaimed poet.^[29]

His family's treatment of women leaves something to be desired. In 2000 he had his daughter Shamsa kidnapped in Cambridge, England; she was bundled into a helicopter and flown out of the country. She has not been seen in public since, and is reportedly kept in Dubai, regularly dosed with tranquilizers.^[30] His daughter Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum fled the country in 2018, first to Oman and then via yacht towards Goa, but she was captured by armed men off the coast of India and apparently returned to Dubai.^[31] One of Sheikh Mohammed's wives, Princess Haya Bint al-Hussein (sister of the King of Jordan), also fled from his loving embrace, hiding in London in 2019 claiming to be afraid for her life; the Sheikh responded with a poem and litigation, while reportedly seizing her racehorses.^[32][33] In 2021 a British court found that the Sheikh had hacked Haya's phone using NSO Pegasus spyware software on eleven occasions in 2020, uploading large amounts of data.^[34]

He has a number of palaces in the UK, where he does not operate entirely above the law: a 2011 employment tribunal revealed claims of racism towards black staff, bullying, and spying on guests.^[35]

Climate change denial[edit]

Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company as well as CEO of the Masdar, which invests in renewable energy, United Nations Climate Change Conference became the president of COP28 (the United Nations Climate Change Conference) in 2023. There was much criticism of UAE naming a fossil fuels company CEO as president, but in his defense, it had been also argued that fossil fuel companies need to part of the solution to mediating climate change. As it turned out, Al Jaber waited until COP28 began to come out as a climate change denier, claiming that there was "no science" indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels was necessary to reduce global warming.^[36]

Gallery[edit]

See also[edit]

• Libertarian paradise#Dubai's Palm Islands

External links[edit]

• Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery - archives of articles related to modern-day slavery in UAE.

References[edit]