UAE: Cybercrimes Decree Attacks Free Speech

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Nov 29, 2012 UAE
[Human Rights Watch logo. Image from hrw.org] [Human Rights Watch logo. Image from hrw.org]

UAE: Cybercrimes Decree Attacks Free Speech

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by Human Rights Watch on 28 November 2012.]

(Beirut) – A new federal decree on cybercrimes in the United Arab Emirates effectively closes off the country’s only remaining forum for free speech. The decree poses a serious threat to the liberty of peaceful activists and ordinary citizens alike.

The UAE president, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, issued Federal Legal Decree No. 5/ 2012 on combating cybercrimes on November 12, 2012. The decree’s vaguely worded provisions provide a legal basis to prosecute and jail people who use information technology to, among other things, criticize senior officials, argue for political reform, or organize unlicensed demonstrations. Although some provisions are aimed at preventing the proliferation of racist or sectarian views online, the principal effect of the law is severe restrictions on the rights to free expression and free association and assembly.

“The UAE’s cybercrimes decree reflects an attempt to ban even the most tempered criticism,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The determination to police and punish on-line dissent, no matter how mild, is incompatible with the image UAE rulers are trying to promote of a progressive, tolerant nation.”

The new decree addresses information technology, which it classifies as “websites, any information network, or information technology means,” and places severe restrictions on the use of blogs and social networking sites, as well as text messages and emails. Given that it will be applied together with provisions of the criminal code and media law that criminalize alleged insults to the country’s rulers, the cybercrime law marks a significant step backward when it comes to free speech, Human Rights Watch said.

Article 28 provides for imprisonment and a fine of up to 1 million dirhams (US$272,000) for anyone who uses information technology “with the intent of inciting to actions, or publishing or disseminating any information, news, caricatures, or other images liable to endanger state security and its higher interests or infringe on the public order.”

Article 29 provides the same penalties for anyone using information technology “with the intent of deriding or harming the reputation, stature, or status of the state, any of its institutions, its president or vice president, the rulers of the emirates, their crown princes or their deputies, the state flag, national safety, its motto, its national anthem, or its symbols.”

Article 30 provides a sentence of up to life in prison for anyone using such means “to advocate the overthrow, change, or usurpation of the system of governance in the state, or obstruct provisions of the constitution or existing law, or oppose the fundamental principles on which the system of governance is based.” It provides for the same sentence for anyone who incites or facilitates these acts.

By enabling the authorities to imprison anyone who makes any critical comment about the country or its rulers, the new decree is at odds with international free speech standards, Human Rights Watch said. Those standards require public officials to tolerate greater criticism than ordinary citizens.

The decree also potentially violates the rights to peaceful assembly and free association. Article 26 provides for a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of 1 million dirhams (US$272,000) for anyone using information technology in any of the activities associated with an “unlawful” group. This includes “intent to facilitate contact between its leaders or members, attract members, promote or applaud its ideas, fund its activities, or provide active aid to it.”

Article 32 authorizes imprisonment or a fine of 500,000 dirhams (US$136,000) for anyone using information technology to “plan, organize, promote, or advocate demonstrations, marches, and the like without a permit from the competent authorities.”

The decree follows the detention without charge of 63 peaceful dissidents in recent months. The government also has forced UAE civil society organizations and local offices of foreign pro-democracy groups to close. The day UAE authorities issued the cybercrimes decree, the families of 63 detainees gathered at the Supreme Court in Abu Dhabi to protest the unlawful detention of their loved ones. Under the new cybercrimes law anyone using information technology to organize a similar peaceful protest risks five years in jail.

A particularly worrying aspect of the new cybercrimes law is article 38, which will prohibit Emiratis from providing information to independent journalists and human rights organizations. Article 38 provides prison terms for anyone using information technology “who provides to any organizations, institutions, agencies, or any other entities incorrect, inaccurate, or misleading information liable to harm state interests or damage its reputation, stature, or status.”

In the aftermath of the European Parliament’s October 26 resolution on the UAE’s deteriorating human rights situation, the authorities sought to discredit the information provided to members of the European parliament by independent rights organizations and defenders. This provision will enable the authorities to sanction people it holds responsible for unfavorable media articles or official reports, a threat to Emiratis who speak with journalists or human rights researchers.

Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the University of Toronto, recently reported that unknown parties hacked the computer of Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights defender, using what industry experts call “legal intercept tools.” Citizen Lab said they had traced the malware back to a physical address in the UAE, registered as the corporate headquarters of the Royal Group, whose chairman belongs to the ruling Al Nahyan family.

The UAE authorities should take immediate steps to bring the cybercrime law into line with international and regional standards on free speech, Human Rights Watch said. The UAE has not ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 19 of which outlines the right to freedom of opinion and expression. But it is a state party to the Arab Charter on Human Rights. Article 32 of the Arab Charter ensures the right to information, freedom of opinion and freedom of expression, and article 24 guarantees the right to freedom of political activity, the right to form and join associations, and the right to freedom of assembly and association.

“The UAE’s attitude toward free speech is regressing almost as quickly as the technology that facilitates it is advancing,” Stork said. “The new cybercrime law is the act of a government out of step and out of touch with international norms.”
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Jadaliyya Reports By :
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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412