In a mass trial against dissidents in the United Arab Emirates that was heavily criticized abroad, 43 people were sentenced to life imprisonment, according to authorities, while others received other prison terms.
The rulings by the Federal Court of Appeal in Abu Dhabi came in a case that the United Arab Emirates government says involves the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Islamic organization that the Emirates has declared a terrorist group.
However, activists denounced the case as an attack on dissidents, which attracted attention and protests at the United Nations climate talks (COP28) held in Dubai in November.
The state news agency WAM reported the verdicts after human rights activists said the sentences had been announced.
Five defendants were sentenced to 15 years in prison, five others to 10 years in prison.
Proceedings against 24 other defendants were discontinued, WAM reported.
“These excessive prison sentences make a mockery of justice and are another nail in the coffin for the UAE’s fledgling civil society,” said Joey Shea, a UAE researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“The United Arab Emirates has dragged dozens of its most committed human rights defenders and members of civil society through a blatantly unfair trial riddled with due process violations and allegations of torture.”
The Emirates Detainees Advocacy Centre, a group led by an Emirati living in exile in Istanbul, reported separately that verdicts had been handed down.
Amnesty International also criticized the verdicts, saying that the defendants were “held in solitary confinement for long periods, had no contact with their families or lawyers, and were sleep deprived by constant loud music.”
The defendants were also “prohibited from receiving the most basic court documents,” it said.
“The trial was a shameless parody of justice and violated several fundamental legal principles, including the principle that you cannot try the same person twice for the same crime and the principle that you cannot retroactively punish people based on laws that did not exist at the time the alleged crime was committed,” said Devin Kenney, a researcher at Amnesty International.
Kenney described some of the defendants as “prisoners of conscience and well-known human rights activists.”
The identity of the convicted persons was not disclosed by WAM.
But among those sentenced to life in prison is activist Nasser bin Ghaith, an academic who has been imprisoned since August 2015 for his social media posts, Shea said.
He was one of dozens of people convicted in the United Arab Emirates during the comprehensive crackdown on the 2011 Arab Spring protests.
These demonstrations led to Islamists coming to power in several Middle Eastern countries, including Brotherhood member Mohammed Morsi in Egypt.
In the Gulf States, the people did not overthrow their governments, and harsh measures were taken against demonstrators and suspected dissidents.
Although the United Arab Emirates is socially liberal in many ways compared to its neighbors, it has strict freedom of expression laws and bans political parties and trade unions.
This was also seen at COP28, where none of the usual protests took place outside the venue because activists were concerned about the extensive network of surveillance cameras in the country.