Marking a decade since the United Arab Emirates (UAE) authorities sentenced 60 members of Emirati civil society to lengthy prison terms in a mass trial, Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, said: “Although we are halfway through the year in which the UAE is in the international spotlight...
African women trafficked into the UAE are forced into debt and subjected to threats and violence, as they are kept in sexual slavery. The case of Christy Gold, who has been charged with sex trafficking in Nigeria, highlights the torment endured by these women in the UAE. On a pleasure boat cruising Gulf waters near...
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) has published a report that presents strong indications that millions of US dollars’ worth of gold is being produced and smuggled out of South Sudan. Tarnished hope; Crime and corruption in South Sudan’s gold sector also outlines how gold is smuggled out of the country, often with the connivance of officials...
States participating in a climate meeting starting on 5 June in Bonn, which will help set the agenda for the COP28 in Dubai later this year, should urge the United Arab Emirates to improve its dismal human rights record to ensure a successful conference, Amnesty International said today. An Amnesty International briefing, The Human Rights Situation...
The United Arab Emirates has become a key trade hub for Russian gold since Western sanctions over Ukraine cut Russia’s more traditional export routes, Russian customs records show. The records, which contain details of nearly a thousand gold shipments in the year since the Ukraine war started, show the Gulf state imported 75.7 tonnes of...
Tanzania’s government wants big tourism money. Herders don’t want to lose their livelihoods. The village of Ololosokwan sits in the Great Rift Valley adjacent to Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, surrounded by thousands of square miles of savanna—grasslands spilling across low hills dotted with mimosa, jacaranda and umbrella-shaped acacia trees. The settlement consists of a few unpaved...
The FBI has issued a warning about fake job ads that recruit workers into forced labor operations in Southeast Asia – some of which enslave visitors and force them to participate in cryptocurrency scams. The warning follows reports of multi-storey slave compounds housing unwilling workers in places like Cambodia, and comes eight months after The Register reported on raids by...
A Dubai princess who was seized trying to flee the sheikhdom in 2018 paid €200,000-€300,000 for a fake Irish passport to aid her escape, a human rights lawyer involved in her campaign for freedom has said. Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum (37) tried to flee the country in 2018 but was detained by commandos...
A Dubai-based Irish businessman has been placed on the US Treasury’s sanctions list as part of move to stop the flow of Russian money abroad. John Hanafin and his Huriya Private firm have been listed along several other individuals and companies used to help Russia evade sanctions. According to a Treasury statement yesterday “Hanafin facilitated...
DUBAI — An Emirati-Turkish man sentenced by the United Arab Emirates in absentia in 2013 to 15 years imprisonment has been sent to the UAE after being detained in Jordan, UAE state media said on Wednesday. UAE state news agency WAM said Khalaf Abd al-Rahman Humaid al-Rumaithi was arrested and handed over to the UAE...