Razeen Prison is a Permanent Place for Human Rights Violations in UAE

The case of civil rights activist Ahmed Mansour reminded us of Al-Razeen prison, which was ranked by the Center for Prison Studies as one of the worst Arab prisons for 2016, including Scorpion, Abu Ghraib, the Negev, and the prisons of the Assad regime in Syria.

Detainees of this prison include Ahmed Mansour, and Group 94 which presented the reform document to document leaks about grave violations of basic rights and laws and called for allowing UN special rapporteurs, UN working groups, human rights organizations, and other international human rights mechanisms to visit detainees of political activists, human rights activists, and bloggers, inspect their conditions and document the violations they face.

Those currently detained in Razeen Prison are the ones who called for the imposition of censorship and granting rights to political detainees there.

Razeen prison is located in the desert of the UAE and is called “Guantanamo” Emirates or the quarry prison. According to leaked information, more than 120 detainees are held in this prison, some of whom have been forcibly disappeared for many years.

This prison practices ongoing violations of the rights of detainees and deprives them of their most basic rights. It is not subject to any kind of monitoring or observation, and we cannot be sure whether those held inside are detainees or forcibly disappeared people.

Detainees Razeen prison are banned from receiving visits and meeting their lawyers. Most of them are held in solitary confinement, where violations are practiced against them, including rape with a stick, electrocution, removing nails, shedding strong lights on them of sleep, and depriving them of treatment and medication.

The prison administration is supervised by Emirati officers and mercenaries from Nepal, India, and other Asian countries.  Some of those released say that those foreigner mercenaries are ordered to torture prisoners so the Emirati officials would not be held accountable, they use fake names, and they do not hesitate to sexually assault any detainee who does not respond to them, which is the preferred method for the prison administration to subdue detainees during interrogation.