Human rights violations in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have intensified in recent years, despite both states’ formal alignment with parts of the international human rights framework. Serious abuses are no longer limited to scattered incidents but have become systemic features of the legal and security architecture in these Gulf states. The realities in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are now starkly visible in a series of emblematic cases that directly confirm the analysis set out in Chapter 2, “Human Rights in the Gulf: Systemic Abuses and the Struggle for Reform”, of my report.
In Saudi Arabia, the expansion of cybercrime and counter‑terrorism‑style laws has turned peaceful expression and non‑violent conduct into punishable offences. The case of Mohammed Ahmed al‑Ghamdi (al‑Hazzaa), a cartoonist and teacher, is emblematic: arrested in 2018 for satirical drawings and online posts critical of government policy, including the 2017–2021 boycott of Qatar, he was repeatedly tried before the Specialised Criminal Court, with a secret retrial in 2024 increasing his sentence from three and a half to 23 years, under what DAWN MENA and MENA Rights Group have described as opaque, security‑driven procedures. This trajectory mirrors the chapter’s argument that in non‑democratic Gulf regimes, special courts and opaque procedures are used to criminalise dissent and shield the state from human rights scrutiny. Another troubling example is the case of Mohamed Kamel Salah Kamel, an Egyptian national executed in Saudi Arabia in 2025 for non‑violent drug charges. MENA Rights Group documents his torture, incommunicado detention, and eventual execution under Article 37(1) of the Anti‑Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Law, while DAWN MENA’s reporting on the surge in Saudi executions highlights the broader pattern of capital punishment being applied to non‑violent offences. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention later found that Kamel’s detention was arbitrary, that his right to a fair trial was violated, and that the death penalty in such circumstances is disproportionate—confirming the chapter’s warning that Saudi Arabia’s selective treaty participation and expansive penal frameworks allow lethal violations of basic rights.
In the United Arab Emirates, recent cases show how the same structural gap between formal commitments and practice manifests in detention and containment policies. Nour Tahiri, an Afghan national, was evacuated to the UAE by a U.S.‑linked private entity under the impression that their stay would be brief and transitional, yet they have been detained in Emirates Humanitarian City since the fall of 2021. MENA Rights Group has brought this case to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which in Opinion No. 68/2024 found that Tahiri and their family have been arbitrarily detained, without any legal basis or effective judicial review, in violation of several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This case illustrates the chapter’s observation that the UAE, by avoiding key treaties such as the ICCPR and the Refugee Convention, builds de facto offshore‑style detention systems that operate outside the protective framework of binding international law.
Equally alarming is the case of Hailan, a Yemeni student at Dubai Police College, arrested at the Mezyad border in 2019 and subsequently transferred to al‑Wathba Prison. MENA Rights Group has framed his case as an enforced disappearance, underscoring the lack of a warrant, the torture he suffered, and the absence of any meaningful judicial control over his detention. DAWN MENA’s broader coverage of Gulf‑related abuses further underscores the pattern of secret procedures and state‑imposed silence surrounding such cases. This trajectory confirms the chapter’s concern that in Gulf security‑driven environments, vague “national security” or sectarian‑style accusations are used to suspend habeas corpus‑style guarantees and the right to know the fate of the detained.
These four cases—al‑Ghamdi, Mohamed Kamel, Nour Tahiri, and Hailan—directly confirm the analysis set out in Chapter 2, “Human Rights in the Gulf: Systemic Abuses and the Struggle for Reform”, of my report. That chapter argues that Gulf states’ selective participation in international human rights instruments, their reliance on non‑democratic regimes, and their expansive use of security‑based laws have produced a structural gap between formal commitments and concrete practices. The experiences of these individuals, as documented in DAWN MENA and MENA Rights Group’s case files, show that this gap is not merely theoretical; it is lived every day by those whose freedom of expression, fair‑trial rights, and right to asylum are systematically violated.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has already concluded that the UAE and the United States share responsibility for the arbitrary detention of Tahiri, and that Kamel’s execution constituted an arbitrary deprivation of life. These findings must not be treated as marginal critiques; they are binding condemnations of systems that instrumentalise security rationales to circumvent human rights.
If the UAE and Saudi Arabia want their “reform” narratives to be taken seriously, they must move beyond rhetoric. This means abolishing security‑based special courts, ending secret retrials and enforced disappearances, dismantling closed‑camp‑style detention environments like Emirates Humanitarian City, and restricting the death penalty strictly to the most serious crimes involving intentional killing. Until then, the dynamics described in Chapter 2 of Human Rights in the Gulf: Systemic Abuses and the Struggle for Reform—as reflected in the DAWN MENA and MENA Rights Group cases—will remain all too visible in the daily realities of those who suffer under the Gulf’s human rights façade.
Vassilios Grammatikas
Assistant Professor of Public International Law