The United Arab Emirates said on Saturday it was conducting a grand trial of 84 past detainees denounced by dissidents while hosting the United Nations COP28 climate talks last month.
The trial will most likely come with a prominent activist praised by a foreign human rights group.
The state-run WAM news agency quoted the country’s attorney general, Hamad al-Shamsi, as saying the 84 defendants face charges of “establishing another secret organization for the purpose of committing acts of violence and terrorism on state territory.”
They did not call the suspects, even though they described “most” of those arrested as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Arab Islamist organization that has long been targeted in the autocratic United Arab Emirates as a risk to its hereditary rulers.
Al-Shamsi said the accused all had a lawyer assigned to them and that after nearly six months of research, prosecutors referred the accused to trial. The statement said the trial was still going on.
In December, the trial was first reported by the Emirates Detainees Advocacy Center, a group run by an Emirati — also called Hamad al-Shamsi — who lives in exile in Istanbul after being named on a terrorism list by the UAE himself. That group said 87 defendants faced trial. The different numbers of defendants reported by the UAE and the group could not be immediately reconciled.
Among those likely to be charged in the case is Ahmed Mansoor, winner of the 2015 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. Mansoor has angered the UAE government by calling for a lax press and democratic freedoms in the federation of seven sheikhs.
Mansoor was targeted by Israeli spyware on his iPhone in 2016, likely deployed through the Emirati government before he was arrested in 2017 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for his activism.
During COP28, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch held a demonstration in which they displayed Mansoor’s face in the U.N.-administered Blue Zone at the summit in a protest carefully watched by Emirati officials.
Another user likely to be charged is activist Nasser bin Ghaith, a teacher who has been detained since August 2015 for his tweets. He is among dozens of others convicted in a sweeping crackdown in the United Arab Emirates following the 2011 Arab Spring protests. The protests have seen Islamists gain strength in several Middle Eastern countries, although the Gulf Arab states have not experienced any popular overthrow of their governments.
The UAE, while socially liberal in many tactics compared to its Middle Eastern neighbors, has strict legislation governing speech and banning political parties and industrial unions. This was noticeable at COP28, where there were none of the typical outdoor protests in the place. , and activists are concerned about the country’s extensive network of surveillance cameras.
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