On Emirati Women’s Day… Rights demands for freedom of women prisoners of conscience
On the occasion of Emirati Women’s Day on 28 August of every year, the Emirates Center for Human Rights highlighted the issue of female prisoners of conscience in Emirati prisons and the violations they suffer.
In a press release, the organization expressed its solidarity with prisoners of conscience in the prisons of the UAE regime, repeating its demand for their release, if the UAE truly respects women and their rights, otherwise this will remain a propaganda that is far from the reality of women in the country.
While the UAE promotes its slogans of respecting for the status of women in various fields of political, economic, and cultural life, and talking about empowering women in the Emirates, we remember the activist Alia Abdel Nour, who died after a journey of suffering that began with the moment of her arrest and then continued in prison while she was struggling with cancer and violations of her minimum rights as a prisoner of conscience.
Alia’s death reveals the lies behind the UAE’s slogans, which spends millions on promoting slogans so that it come out to the world with the image of the state that sponsors rights, freedoms, tolerance, and happiness.
The violations of human rights and oppressive policies against activists and their families have undermined the freedom of women defending human rights, their personal safety, their right to free expression of their opinion, civic political participation, their right to work, travel, study, nationality, and their right to a fair trial and other rights.
The organization confirmed that the suffering of female prisoners of conscience in Emirati prisons, such as Amina Al-Abdouli, Maryam Al-Balooshi and others, has extended arbitrary detention and reached mock trials that lack any aspect of a fair trial.
The organization stressed that subjecting prisoners of conscience to torture and ill-treatment is a flagrant violation of physical and psychological sanctity, and in violation of the provisions of the UAE constitution and international standards related to human rights and the rights of detainees in particular.
The Emirates Center for Human Rights urged the UAE to include all citizens of the nation with tolerance and respect it promotes to, calling for the immediate and unconditional release of women prisoners of conscience on the background of their social and human rights activities and to stop harassing all those who are related to prisoners of conscience and to enable them to enjoy all their rights like other citizens of the state.
The organization also called for an end to the violations inside prisons and the opening of an immediate and impartial investigation into the torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearance and arbitrary arrest they were subjected to, and holding all those found guilty to account.
The Emirates Center for Human Rights also urged to expedite the implementation of the recommendations of the universal periodic review and to lift the reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention against Torture.
