ICFUA calls for the release of Dr Mohammed Al Roken

As the new year approaches, ICFUAE reiterates its call for the immediate and unconditional release of Dr Mohammed Al Roken, a prominent Emirati human rights lawyer and activist, who has dedicated much of his career to providing legal assistance to victims of human rights violations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

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. 

In November 2015, Amnesty International revealed that Dr Al Roken had been subjected to “music torture” whereby prison authorities continuously blasted propaganda music in his cell at excruciating volumes, leading to him losing consciousness due to high blood pressure, and exacerbating his ear infection.