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The Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeal in the UAE sentenced 43 people to life in prison in a mass trial on Wednesday.
The trial was criticised by human rights groups who said it targeted political dissidents and activists, linking them to Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UAE.
The defendants were sentenced for “creating, establishing and managing the Justice and Dignity Committee” for the purpose of committing terrorist acts in the country, state news agency WAM reported.
The court said they “have worked to create and replicate violent events in the country, similar to what has occurred in other Arab states — including protests and clashes between the security forces and protesting crowds — that led to deaths and injuries and to the destruction of facilities, as well as the consequent spread of panic and terror among people”.
The court, however, acquitted 24 other defendants.
Those sentenced included prominent academic Nasser bin Ghaith and activist Ahmed Mansoor.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International condemned the trial for alleged due process violations and called for the immediate release of the defendants.
“These over-the-top long sentences make a mockery of justice and are another nail in the coffin for the UAE’s nascent civil society,” Joey Shea, a researcher focusing on the UAE for Human Rights Watch told news agency Associated Press.
“The UAE has dragged scores of its most dedicated human rights defenders and civil society members through a shamelessly unfair trial riddled with due process violations and torture allegations.”
Amnesty International’s UAE researcher Devin Kenney said in a statement that the Gulf nation “must urgently revoke this unlawful verdict and immediately release the defendants”.
“The trial has been a shameless parody of justice and violated multiple fundamental principles of law, including the principle that you cannot try the same person twice for the same crime, and the principle that you cannot punish people retroactively under laws that didn’t exist at the time of the alleged offence,” he said. “Trying 84 Emiratis at once, including 26 prisoners of conscience and well-known human rights defenders, is a scarcely disguised exercise in punishing dissenters that has been further marred by a myriad of fair trial violations, the most serious of which is uninvestigated allegations of torture and other ill-treatment.”
Khalid Ibrahim of the Gulf Center for Human Rights told the BBC it was “a real tragedy that so many activists and human rights defenders will remain in prison for decades, deprived of watching their children grow up, for no other reason than calling for a better future for Emiratis”.
