Press Release: Seven-Year UAE Prison Sentence for Qatari Doctor Based on Forced Confessions

[Logo of the Alkarama Foundation. Image from alkarama.org] [Logo of the Alkarama Foundation. Image from alkarama.org]

Press Release: Seven-Year UAE Prison Sentence for Qatari Doctor Based on Forced Confessions

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued by the Alkarama Foundation on 9 March 2014]

UAE: Qatari Doctor Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison on Basis of Forced Confessions

Dr Abdulrahmane Al Jaidah, a Qatari doctor arrested one year ago at Dubai international Airport by the State Security Services, was sentenced to seven years imprisonment following an unfair trial on 3 March 2014 by the Abu Dhabi Federal Supreme Court for "helping an illegal secret organisation". He is currently imprisoned in Al-Razeen prison, the same detention facility where some of the UAE94 are being unlawfully detained. Today, Alkarama asked the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to intervene with the UAE authorities to request his immediate release.

Abducted at Dubai International Airport a Year Ago

Dr Abdulrahmane Al Jaidah was arrested on 26 February 2013 at Dubai international airport, as he was transiting through Dubai on his way home from Thailand to Qatar where he works as a senior medical practitioner at Qatar Petroleum. While going through a routine security check, he was arrested by UAE State Security forces and disappeared, without being allowed to inform his family of his whereabouts until 8 March 2013. He was not presented with a warrant during his arrest, nor was he notified of the charges pending against him. Following his disappearance, Alkarama solicited an urgent intervention by the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances on 21 March 2013.

Detained and Tortured in Unknown Location for 8 Months

Dr Al Jaidah was kept at an unknown location for the eight first months of his detention before being charged. During this time, those detaining him tortured him by depriving him of sleep, beating the soles of his feet and repeatedly punching him in the face. They threatened to remove his nails, hang him and bury him in a nearby graveyard. On 23 May 2013, Dr Al Jaidah was brought a 39-page file, and was asked to sign each page without being able to read what was written. Dr Al Jaidah was told by a man called Abu Khamis that he would be released and allowed to return home once he had signed these papers.

On 26 May 2013, Mr Al Jaidah was brought to the office of Prosecutor Saqr Naqb. An agent brought him and his luggage to the Prosecutor`s office, and Dr Al Jaidah was told by the Prosecutor that he will be very soon able to return home. Instead, Dr Al Jaidah was returned to his place of detention and accused of helping and funding an "illegal secret organisation".

Moreover, it appears that the reasons for Dr Al Jaidah`s detention are politically motivated, as seem to indicate the questions asked by State Security Services. State Security interrogators repeatedly asked Dr Al Jaidah about his political convictions and his alleged connection to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Unfair Trial

Dr Al Jaidah`s trial began before the Federal Supreme Court on 4 November 2013. Nine hearings took place until 3 March 2014, when the court delivered its verdict, condemning Dr Al Jaidah to seven years imprisonment for "helping an illegal secret organisation".

Dr Al Jaidah was convicted on the sole basis of the papers he had signed without being able to read. It is presumed they contained the confessions which were extracted under torture during his secret detention. His condemnation on the sole basis of these coerced confessions constitute a grave violation of the Convention against Torture that the UAE ratified on 19 July 2012.

Dr Al Jaidah was not allowed to consult or be represented by a lawyer until 30 December 2013, when he was able to meet with a lawyer for an hour prior to the 6th hearing of his trial. However, this only meeting with the lawyer was in the presence of State Security agents and recorded, infringing art. 16(3) of the Arab Charter of Human Rights ratified by the UAE in 2008 which states that the accused has the right "to defend himself or through legal assistance of his own choosing or with the assistance of his lawyer, with whom he can freely and confidentially communicate [our emphasis]."

Because Dr Al Jaidah was tried by the Federal Supreme Court, the sentence is definitive and cannot be appealed. This is in clear contradiction with the international fair trial standards, as well as article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stating that "everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him."

Finally, Dr Al Jaidah`s deferral to the Federal Supreme Court was not justified by the prosecution, and the nature of the charges held against him cannot justify the fact that Mr Al Jaidah was not first presented to a court of first instance. This infringes the Emirati constitution, which states at article 25 that "all citizens are equal before the Law", as well as article 40 stating that "foreign nationals enjoy the rights and the liberties guaranteed by the International Conventions and Treaties the United Arab Emirates are party to".

As no legal basis can be evoked to justify Dr Al Jaidah`s detention which appears to be politically motivated and as he was sentenced after a grossly unfair trial, Alkarama asked the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to request the Emirati authorities to release him immediately, and provide reparation for the torture and arbitrary detention he has suffered.

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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