NGOs Criticize UAE over Human Rights Abuses

Rasa - Human rights NGOs gathered on Wednesday at the UN headquarters in Geneva called for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to comply with international standards with regards to human rights.

News ID: 438551

Date: 05 July 2018 - 23:02

RNA - During a session at the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva, human rights watchdogs expressed concern about severe human rights abuses such as systematic touter and arbitrary detentions in UAE, Middle East Monitor reported.

Julia Legner, an international legal expert who works for Geneva-based Alkamara NGO said the torture and arbitrary arrests were still going on in the UAE.

“We are continuously concerned about human rights abuse in UAE,” she added and asserted that the local authorities have been hampering the investigations.

"We have engaged with the UAE government on this issue and requested access to UAE-run prisons in the country but to date we have not been granted access," Liz Throssell, UN right office Spokeswoman told Anadolu Agency on Tuesday.

"From the initial information that our office in Yemen has managed to gather, we have reason to believe that a number of Yemeni detainees have been subjected to ill-treatment, torture and sexual abuse by UAE soldiers," she added.

The UN agency is continuing to monitor the situation with a view to decide what follow-up steps are needed, she stated.

The Associated Press (AP) revealed in a report in June that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) tortured Yemeni prisoners across 18 prisons in Yemen.

Hundreds of Yemeni prisoners were subject to sexual abuse in Southern Yemen, where the UAE focuses its foreign policy in Yemen. Fifteen UAE officers ordered Yemeni prisoners to undress and lie down for anal cavity checks, claiming they were looking for contraband mobile phones. The Yemeni prisoners who resisted were beaten until they bled, and threatened with barking dogs.

Hundreds of other detainees suffered similar sexual abuse on 10 March at Beir Ahmed prison in Southern Yemen, Aden, according to seven witnesses who spoke to the AP.

Despite countless human rights reports detailing abuse in Yemen, Marine Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway, Pentagon Spokesperson, announced that “US forces are required to report credible allegations of detainee abuse. We have received no credible allegations that would substantiate the allegations put forth in your line of question/story”.

US officials have acknowledged that American forces receive intelligence from UAE partners and have participated in interrogations in Yemen.

Witnesses told The Associated Press that Yemeni guards working under the direction of UAE officers used various methods of sexual torture and humiliation. Detainees were raped while other guards recorded the abuse on their mobile phones. Detainees had their genitals electrocuted and rocks hung from their testicles, and others were abused with wooden and steel poles.

“They strip you naked, then tie your hands to a steel pole from the right and the left so you are spread open in front of them. Then the sodomising starts,” one father of four stated.

The detainees smuggled letters and drawings to the AP describing the sexual abuse.

Of the five prisons, AP located, four of them are in Aden, Southern Yemen.

“One is at the Buriqa base – the headquarters for the Emirati forces. A second is at the house of Shallal Shaye, the Aden security chief closely allied with the UAE, and a third is at a nightclub-turned-prison called Wadah. The fourth is at Beir Ahmed, where the March atrocities occurred”, the AP investigation read.

US personnel have been seen at the Buriqa base, along with Colombian mercenaries, according to two prisoners and two security officials.

The detainees could not say whether the Americans, some of whom wear military uniforms, are members of the US government or mercenaries.

Saudi Arabia and its allies launched the war on Yemen in March 2015 to reinstall Yemen’s former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement in late March that the war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured until then.

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