Amnesty International urges the UAE authorities to release Mohammed Al-Roken

Amnesty International called on UAE authorities to release the Emirati human rights defender Mohammed al-Roken on July 17th 2022 when his sentence ends.

Detaining people beyond their sentence is a brazen contempt for the rule of law, the international rights group stressed.

Dr Al Roken is an award-winning academic and professor of constitutional law, well known for representing the UAE 5, a group of human rights activists who were convicted and later pardoned for running a website criticising the Emirati government. 

On July 17, 2012, Dr Al Roken himself was arrested and held in solitary confinement, incommunicado, at a secret location. On July 2, 2013, he was unjustly sentenced to 20 years in prison by Abu Dhabi’s Federal Supreme Court as part of the grossly unfair UAE 94 mass trial. He was tried alongside 93 other social and political activists, 64 of whom were charged with “plotting against the government” after signing a petition calling for democratic reform in the Gulf state. 

Since his conviction, Dr Al Roken has been held in Abu Dhabi’s Al-Razeen prison, notoriously known as the Guantanamo of the UAE. Al-Razeen prison routinely fails to meet the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and is infamous for the torture and ill-treatment of inmates.