Long post. Sorry.
One point which has not arisen in the thread so far is that there is a valid distinction to be drawn between countries which do not provide for any legal protection of human rights at all, and countries where although the human rights of individuals are in fact protected by law, in any given case there may have been breaches of those rights. In other words, between the states that just don't care about human rights, and the states that do, even if breaches of those rights occur in individual cases. It may be helpful to start with a reminder of how what we now think of as universal human rights came to be formally and systematically recognized, and why they are so important.
During world war II the regime of Nazi Germany systematically exterminated millions of its own people and the people of the neighbouring lands they invaded. The personal liberty, property, faith, and life of literally millions was extinguished on the whim of those who had the power to do so. Imperial Japan was guilty of similar abominations. Following the end of the war, the United Nations adopted in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a statement of the rights that every single man woman and child on the planet ought to enjoy as a matter of principle. The rights protected by the declaration included the right to life, to liberty, to a fair trial if accused of a criminal offence, a right to privacy and family life, and to freedom of expression. In Europe, British lawyers in particular were responsible for drafting a similar declaration. That became the European Convention on Human Rights which was adopted by most of Western Europe in 1950. The ECHR was the first international treaty to give legal effect to the rights promultaged by the Universal Declaration, so the European Convention is in effect the blueprint for modern international human rights law.
(It is precisely this proud history which makes it so dispiriting to read the views of senior British politicians that serious consideration should be given to withdrawing from the ECHR. Some of the views expressed in this thread that human rights abuses in Abu Dhabi, if they take place, are no concern of City fans are equally disappointing.)
In the Arab world, after years of wrangling, an international instrument of broadly equivalent effect to the EHCR called the Arab Charter on Human Rights was adopted by a number of Arab countries in 1994. This was given legal effect in 2004. The UAE is a signatory to the Arab Charter. (Some may know that in 2011 Syria's membership of the Charter was suspended due to the worsening human rights situation there.)
David Conn’ describes the human rights abuse in Abu Dhabi - more accurately, the UAE - in the following way:
“Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have vehemently protested against the mass arrest of 94 people, their alleged torture while in Abu Dhabi jails, a "fundamentally unfair" trial, and long prison sentences with no right of appeal handed down earlier this month to the 69 people convicted. Amnesty said the treatment of the 94 in the United Arab Emirates, where Sheikh Mansour al-Nahyan's family, rulers of the richest emirate, Abu Dhabi, are dominant, "shows the authorities' determination to crush any form of dissent".
The 94 were tried on charges of plotting to overthrow the UAE government, which remains adamant this was proven against the 69 convicted. The regime, whose army and security services are headed by Sheikh Mansour's brother, Sheikh Mohammed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, maintains the 69 were operating as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, and seeking to impose a conservative Islamist state, including by military means. The defendants, who include lawyers, teachers and academics, say this was a crackdown by an increasingly authoritarian state, after they voiced valid criticisms of the regime, calling for more democracy and freedom of speech.”
Two major criticisms are set out there and in the balance of the piece: the first is that the defendants' right to free speech and free assembly was impaired by the charges against them, secondly that the criminal proceedings against the accused were monstrously unfair. Mr Conn appears to support the conclusion that the UAE is guilty of human rights breaches on both counts, and suggests that this should be of concern to City fans given that in his private capacity Sheikh Mansour is the owner of our club. At no stage of his article however does Mr Conn explore the issue of whether the UAE is a land in which human rights are simply an unknown quantity, so to speak, or whether there is a regime for the protection of human rights in place even if (as the Amnesty/HRW conclusions indicate) it has not been complied with in this case.
This is I think a crucial distinction, because as others have suggested, many nations including our own have admirable structures in place for the protection of human and civil rights, yet abuses and breaches nonetheless take place. The following are cut and pasted from a recent Amnesty International press release regarding the UK and the USA.
“Human rights concerns:
• The highly controversial Justice and Security Act (allowing “secret courts”) recently passed into law despite opposition from hundreds of lawyers and numerous human rights organisations. Amnesty said the measures are an affront to the principles of open justice and are “Kafkaesque”.
• The recently-enacted Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act has raised fears that changes to legal aid will seriously restrict access to justice, particularly for overseas victims of abuses by UK multinational companies.
• Toxic language about human rights in the UK is common. While often lauding human rights in a foreign context, some politicians treat them with contempt at home, as do sections of the media. In some quarters there has been an almost continuous drumbeat of threats to “scrap the Human Rights Act” and to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.
Case: a 43-year-old - who can only be publicly identified as “G” - has been subjected to detention or required to live under highly restrictive conditions over a ten-year period, based in large part on secret evidence he has never seen. “G” told Amnesty: “I want justice: the opportunity to defend myself, in a fair trial […] I am not even allowed to know the evidence the state claims to have against me.””
And
“Human rights concerns:
• The USA is a major user of capital punishment and last year 43 people were executed, the fifth highest number anywhere in the world.
• The US authorities are still holding 166 detainees at the notorious detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The vast majority have not been charged with an offence and most have been there for over ten years.
• At least 42 people across 20 US states died after being struck by police Tasers last year, bringing the total number of such deaths to 540 since 2001.
• Thousands of prisoners in the USA are held in solitary confinement in “super-maximum security” prisons, confined to small cells for 22-24 hours a day.
Cases: former UK resident Shaker Aamer, 44, has been held at Guantánamo Bay without charge or trial for 11-and-a-half years. Via his lawyers, Aamer has alleged he was subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, including severe beatings, while held in secret US detention in Afghanistan in early 2002, and claims he has been further mistreated at Guantánamo. Along with over 100 other Guantánamo detainees, he has reportedly been on hunger strike for several months to protest at his continued detention.”
So far as I am aware there is not a single country in the entire world which has a completely unblemished human rights record. If the UAE has a sytem of law in place for the protection of human rights, but is blasted as a 'human rights black hole' because in individual cases those rights are not observed, that would seem to me to be judging the UAE to a higher standard than my own country is judged.
What then is the machinery in place to protect human rights in the UAE and Abu Dhabi in particular? To deal with the two main complaints raised in David Conn's piece, Article 13 of the Arab Charter on Human Rights guarantees within member states the right to a fair trial. It says that
"everyone has the right to a fair trial that affords adequate guarantees before a competent, independent and impartial court constituted by law to hear any criminal charge against him."
Then, under Article 24 of the charter:
“Every citizen has the right: (…)
To freely form and join associations with others.
To freedom of association and peaceful assembly.
No restrictions may be placed on the exercise of these rights other than those which are prescribed by law and which are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
So there is no doubt that as a matter of general principle human rights in the arab world are protected by this and other instruments, just as they are protected in Europe by the Convention of 1950.
One further important point should be noted which I will address further below. There is a difference between what human rights lawyers often refer to as 'absolute' human rights, and 'qualified' human rights. The right to a fair trail for instance is absolute. There are no exceptions to this - that is to say, there are no circumstances in which an unfair trial is ever compatible with human rights law. However the right to freedom of speech, for instance, is moderated in some respects. The right to free speech does not for instance give an individual the right to incite violence or racial hatred. So there are limits on how far the right of "free" speech actually goes. Each nation is allowed a degree of leeway in deciding what is appropriate within its borders - this is known as the margin of appreciation. In France for instance it has been decided that you cannot express yourself by the clothes you wear in certain respects - in particular the wearing of Burkhas in public. The French have gone further in this respect than our lawmakers have been prepared to, but that's their call: that's what the 'margin of appreciation' means.
Okay, moving on to the UAE and Abu Dhabi specifically. Many of you will know the basic history of the UAE, namely that is a federated state formed about 40 odd years ago by a number of territories - emirates - which had previously been independent. In doing so, a constitution was adopted. I know very little about the constitutional law of the UAE but a modest amount of research on the Internet revealed that according to Article 28 of the constitution:
'an accused person shall be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a legal and fair trial, have the right to appoint legal representatives...'
There are a number of other articles within the constitution that you would expect to appear in the constitution of any civilised modern nation. Under Article 25 all persons are equal before the law, without distinction between citizens of the Union in regard to race, nationality, religious belief or social status. Personal liberty is guaranteed; no person may be arrested, searched, detained or imprisoned except in accordance with the provisions of law. Under Article 29 freedom of movement is guaranteed, within limits of the law. Under Article 30 freedom of expression is guaranteed, within limits of the law. Under Article 33 freedom of assembly is guaranteed, within limits of the law. None of this is particularly surprising, bearing in mind that as I inderstand it the constition of the UAE was drafted by a respected Judge.
The modest amount of research involved in the above (if I say so myself) categorically disproves the idea that there is no protection for human rights in place in the UAE. In fairness Mr Conn did not say that there was not, but his article does not deign to mention the protections that are in place (whether or not they have been ignored in any given case) and rather gives the impression that human rights law stops at the UAE’s frontiers: phrases like ‘deeply flawed judicial system’ and ‘a black hole for basic human rights’ do not exactly conjure up an image of a system which, like our own and like the USA’s system, looks to protect human rights even if it does prevent human rights abuses in every single instance. So the conclusion must I think be that the UAE has in place entirely appropriate legal mechanisms for protecting fundamental human rights - not something that Mr Conn points out anywhere in his article. Whether those mechanisms are always applied and adhered to is a different question.
So let us take the two principle allegations made in Mr Conn’s article. The first relates to the denial of freedom of expression. Well, as I’ve already pointed out, that is a qualified right in any event. The recent ‘twitter rape threats’ conclusively prove conclusively that universal and unlimited freedom of expression does not exist in this country, ditto the French ban on wearing the Burkha in public. This is why what I referred to as the margin of appreciation is important: Article 30 of the UAE constitution guarantees freedom of expression ‘within the limits of the law’. Article 24 of the Arab Charter refers to the right to freedom of expression and adds
“No restrictions may be placed on the exercise of these rights other than those which are prescribed by law and which are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
(Emphasis added)
Let me go back to what Mr Conn says in his piece:
“The people arrested were mostly members of a long-established Muslim social organisation, al-Islah, who say they are not fundamentalist but do openly take issue with elements of the country's rule. They argue that the super-capitalist development has been done without sufficient consultation and is a departure too far from traditional Muslim values, that the ruling family is not accountable for how the country's money is spent, and that freedom is too limited. As they include middle-aged, educated people, they say it is ridiculous to accuse them of believing they could overthrow the regime, given the wealth, might and security apparatus of the UAE.
Last summer, after the number of people arrested had grown to over 50, the official Emirates News Agency stated that the security services' investigation revealed that those arrested had "set up links with external elements, and had worked in an organised and systematic manner, causing harm to the country and spreading false information, in order to incite others against the country and to distort its shining image before the world".
Is Mr Conn suggesting that the UAE is not entitled to decide for itself whether the laws limiting freedom of expression which a court found had been breached by these defendants were not ‘necessary in the interests of national security or public safety, public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’? I suspect he is not, for obvious reasons. Yet if it is accepted that the UAE must be entitled to decide for itself where to draw the line between unlimited free speech and that which should be outlawed in the public good, it is difficult to see what criticism can be made if citizens of the UAE have crossed that line: no more could the UK authorities be criticized for bringing a prosecution in relation to the twitter rape threat.
The more serious, and by far the more difficult, allegations relate to the fairness of the trial to the accused. Unlike freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial allows no exceptions. The use of torture to obtain information or confessions, for instance, is an appalling violation of the most basic human rights. (The Home Secretary, it will be remembered, was quite ready to allow the deportation of Abu Qatada to face proceedings in which the evidence used against him had been extracted by torture. It was an appalling stance to take and one which the Courts quite rightly said was completely unlawful.)
As a general proposition, I would have thought it self evident that the more seriously a government judges a threat to national security, the more willing it is to transgress human rights laws to which it is subject in dealing with that threat. What happened in Guantanamo Bay involved clear and repeated breach of human rights of a serious and systematic nature: that's why the Americans took certain prisoners there, so that the constitutional protections to which anyone physically present in the USA is entitled were not engaged. What the British Government has done in Northern Ireland in the 80s and 90s has involved repeated breaches of human rights law. If there has been human rights abuse in the UAE the perceived threat to national security does not excuse it or justify it, but it does provide some context which I think is absent from Mr Conn’s piece.
We are not told how many of the 94 defendants alleged torture, but even one allegation is one too many. If the allegations relating to the fairness of the proceedings in the UAE have substance, that is appalling and it has no place in a civilized society. I have no doubt that the government of the UAE would regard itself, with considerable justification, as a highly civilized society. That must in my view be investigated further, and if human rights breaches are revealed, the guilty parties brought to justice. Yet in this context the following point is interesting:
“The UAE authorities' response to the torture allegations, which were raised in court, is to argue that the alleged victims should have reported them to the police. "The UAE judicial system ensures that the rule of law prevails and that no person is above the law," the Ministry of Justice said in a statement. "Therefore anyone can resort to the public authorities to report assault, request protection, or claim compensation and ensure that any person committing any offence or felony is punished under law."”
The UAE authorities’ stance, then, appears to be that the allegation of torture was not reported to the authorities at the relevant time.
IF that is right, it is difficult to see what can be done. The reason why Abu Qatada’s human rights were (eventually) respected by the UK government is because he complained about the breach of them, not because the government decided that they couldn’t deport him to a country in which torture had been used to exact information from him. If the machinery designed to protect human rights isn’t switched on, you can’t really expect it to work.
The following point is perhaps of greater interest:
“At the first court hearing on 4 March 2013 in Abu Dhabi, Amnesty and HRW reported that several defendants told the judge they had been "seriously ill-treated during months in detention". They described prolonged solitary confinement, hooding, sleep deprivation and being subjected to extremes of temperatures. The report said the judge ordered medical examinations of the defendants, so the allegations could be investigated, but both human rights groups say no such investigation has taken place.”
Why not? A judge ordered those examinations to take place. It seems appalling that a Judge has ordered that examinations should be carried out and his order has been ignored, but it is difficult to see how that justifies the conclusion that the judicial system in teh UAE is ‘deeply flawed’ – it is not what happens at judicial level that is the problem, it is what goes on afterwards. (Imagine if a judge in England ordered the Police or the Crown Prosecution Service to do something that they didn’t then do. That could never happen, could it?)
It is of course quite possible that these statements of high principle from the Ministry of Justice and the order made by the Judge for medical examinations to be carried out are actually somewhat disingenuous: that everybody in authority who matters in the UAE knows what is going on and they all turned a blind eye to it. That seems to be the inference that Mr Conn invites the reader to draw. Yet when you stand back and look at the UAE, the abiding picture that you get is not of a despotic repressive regime. This is not Saddam’s Iraq or Gadaffi’s Libya. Before reaching the conclusion that the authorities in the UAE are complicit in torture and serious human rights abuses, I would want to see a great deal more evidence of it. I certainly am not persuaded on the evidence in this article – not by a long distance – that the UAE features the systematic abuse of human rights.
What of the allegation that the lawyers defending the accused were subjected to harassment and intimidation? To return to Mr Conn’s piece:
In July (2012) two lawyers who had defended Ahmed Mansoor in the "UAE 5" trial, Dr Mohamed al-Mansoori and Dr Mohamed al-Roken, were arrested. In December (2012), the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute issued a statement saying it was "deeply concerned by the worsening situation for human rights lawyers in the UAE." The British barrister Baroness Kennedy, co-chair of IBAHRI, said: "Disturbing reports of an increasing catalogue of detention, deportation, intimidation and harassment of lawyers by the UAE authorities is creating a climate of fear among the legal profession – seriously undermining the rule of law in the country.
We are not told what the charges are against the two arrested lawyers. The implication seems to be that their arrest was part of a campaign of intimidation of the legal profession when they have the temerity to try to defend innocent people the state is determined to send to prison. Yet Mr Conn’s article does not link the two arrested lawyers to the defence of the 94 accused. It is at least plausible that their arrest in July 2012 related to the ‘UAE 5’ trial which was concluded in 2011. It is not unheard of even in the UK for lawyers to face charges if they have for instance conspired with their clients to pervert the course of justice, so the mere fact that a lawyer has been arrested tells us nothing. The absence of any clear connection in Mr Conn’s piece between the arrests of the lawyers and the prosecution of these 94 individuals might suggest that there is in no fact no connection at all other than the one Mr Conn invites us to make by dropping the fact of the arrest of 2 lawyers on unconnected charges (if that is in fact the position) into his discussion of the prosection of these 94 individuals.
Helena Kennedy, by the way, is a distinguished and thoroughly respected human rights campaigner, whose sole agenda is the promotion of human rights. She is an eminently credible source. Yet in December 2012 she referred to ‘an increasing catalogue’ of harassment of lawyers, and so far as I can see there has not been a single instance of such a complaint since then – perhaps there has been, but this is not reported in the media nor have I found it on the internet. I have to say, whilst the spectre of lawyers being harassed and intimidated horrifies me as a matter of general principle, I am unimpressed by the evidence produced so far that it is a regular feature of life as a UAE attorney.
So standing back, what do we as City fans make of all this? Given that the man who owns our club is the Deputy Prime Minister of the UAE, I think it is entirely legitimate for Mr Conn to raise questions about human rights abuses there, if they have occurred. What concerns me is that I am being invited to conclude that they have occurred on untested evidence. I am told in Mr Conn's piece of systematic perpetration of serious human rights abuses but I am not presented with credible evidence. There are some allegations of a serious nature which should be investigated and which have not been investigated so far, but that is a rather different thing. A suspicion of the use of torture is undoubtedly concerning, but a conclusion that there has been torture seems somewhat premature.
The general reader is not informed by Mr Conn's article about the mechanisms which the UAE has in place (including its own constitution) for the protection of human rights. He is invited to treat the principle of free speech as an absolute right, repression of which is an abuse of human rights, even though our own country places limitations on free speech, as do most other civilized societies. He is invited to make a connection between this case and the arrest of lawyers instructed in another cases on unspecified charges, even though no connection is apparent.
Ultimately the source quoted by Mr Conn invites me to conclude that the club I love
“is being used as a branding vehicle to promote and effectively launder the reputation of a country perpetrating serial human rights abuses,"
Based on the limited discussion in Mr Conn's article, I decline to do so.
