UN committee expresses concern over UAE torture of Yemenis
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The UN Committee against Torture criticizes Abu Dhabi for its slacking on human rights.
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Yemeni prisoners, June 20, 2018 (Reuters)
The United Nations Committee against Torture has expressed concern about the torture and ill-treatment by UAE armed forces, state security agencies, and non-state armed groups against Yemenis.
The Committee highlighted the UAE's involvement in the war on Yemen and assigned special responsibility to investigators and prosecutors that work with crimes of torture and abuse, calling for a "viable path through which victims seek justice."
Read more: 100+ Saudi-led coalition violations in Yemen recorded
The Committee also spoke about the ongoing practice of female genital mutilation in the UAE and the fact that there is no legislation criminalizing it.
They called on the UAE to “strengthen its efforts to eradicate gender-based violence and harmful practices through the enactment of new legislation and awareness-raising campaigns.”
The French newspaper Le Monde revealed, in a 2019 report, that the UAE ran a secret prison in a military base that it set up in mid-2017 on a part of a gas field in southern Yemen.
Expo 2020; a facade to UAE human rights abuses
Last October, Human Rights Watch said the UAE is using Dubai Expo 2020 to promote a "public image of openness that is at odds with the government’s efforts to prevent scrutiny of its rampant systemic human rights violations."
HRW's Deputy Middle East Director, Michael Page, criticized the UAE's double standards, saying that dozens of the Emirate's "peaceful domestic critics have been arrested, railroaded in blatantly unfair trials, and condemned to many years in prison simply for trying to express their ideas on governance and human rights." He added that the Expo gives the UAE another chance to present itself to the world as a country of tolerance and respect for human rights while preventing political expression, public discourse, and activism.
Page also said countries showcasing their pavilions at the Dubai Expo should help prevent the UAE's attempts to whitewash itself "by either advocating for the UAE to unconditionally release all those unjustly detained for exercising their right to free expression and to regularly open up the country, including its jails and its courts, to scrutiny by independent researchers and monitors, or not participate [sic] in the Expo," adding that governments and businesses have a human rights responsibility to avoid helping the UAE "whitewash its abuses."
On September 17, the EU Parliament voted for a resolution condemning the UAE's human rights abuses, focusing on the issue of human rights advocate Ahmad Mansour and the continued use of torture and persecution of detainees.
