AHMED MANSOOR AL SHEHHI

 AHMED MANSOOR AL SHEHHI

Ahmed Mansoor is the UAE’s most celebrated human rights activist. Prior to his arest, Mansoor had dedicated over a decade of his life to advocating for human rights in his country and the wider Middle East and North Africa region, undeterred by multiple earlier government attempts to silence him. He is one of the few voices within the United Arab Emirates (UAE) who provides a credible independent assessment of human rights developments in the country. He regularly raisesed concerns on arbitrary detention, torture or ill or degrading treatment, failure to meet international standards for fair trials, non-independence of the judiciary, domestic laws that violate internationallaw, and other violations of civil rights.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Master of Science in Telecommunications from the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States. In 2012, during his third year of law school, he was physically attacked and had to suspend his studies.

Since 2006, he has focussed on initiatives concerning freedom of expression, civil and political rights. He campaigned in 2006-2007 to support an online site owner who was jailed along with another writer of the site for critical social comments. The campaign succeeded in releasing the two individuals and dropping the charges against them. Shortly after, the Prime Minister of UAE issued an order not to jail journalists in relation to their work.

Ahmed Mansoor ran the online discussion forum UAEHewar.net, which he used to initiate a petition calling for political reform in the UAE. He was later accused of publicly insulting the UAE leadership and was sentenced to three years imprisonments, but released one day after the verdict on presidential pardon after spending nearly eight months in jail.

In 2009, he initiated an effort to oppose a draft media law that violates freedom of expression and freedom of information. The effort resulted in writing a petition to the president of the country urging him not to approve the draft law. The draft law was subsequently suspended. 

He was one of the initiators of the 3 March 2011 petition that called for democratic reform in the UAE. Shortly, afterwards, he was jailed with four others in connection with the online discussion forum, UAEHewar.net, in what became widely known as the UAE5 case. He was accused of publicly insulting the UAE leadership and was sentenced to three years imprisonments, but released one day after the verdict on presidential pardon after spending nearly eight months in jail.

He has also worked on or written about Stateless persons, widely known as Bidoon in the region.

He was a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division and the Advisory Board of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights. He was awarded a Hellman-Hammet grant designed to provide financial support to those have lost their employment due to their human rights work.

His reports and research on freedom of expression have been published or used as reference material by human rights and International Research groups.

He attended the 2008-2009 United National Universal Periodic Review of the UAE’s Human rights record. He was the only individual outside the official delegation of UAE. He managed to have several countries and NGOs adopt specific comments and concerns and raise them as recommendations to UAE. Inside the UAE, he meets regularly with the international human rights organizations, the United Nations and the International media to address and discuss the human rights situation.

Since he was jailed in 2011, the authorities have denied him a passport and banned him from travelling.

Mansoor was detained again in March 2017, accused of using social media platforms to "publish false and misleading information". For more than a year following his arrest, Mansoor’s family, friends, and colleagues did not know where authorities were detaining him. He had no access to a lawyer and was granted only two half-hour family visits, six months apart, in a location different to his place of detention.  In May 2018, the Abu Dhabi Court of Appeals sentenced Mansoor to 10 years in prison on charges stemming solely from his peaceful criticism of government policies and his modest calls for human rights reform. On December 31, 2018, the UAE’s Federal Supreme Court, the court of last resort, upheld his sentence, quashing his final chance at early release. Since his arrest, and for almost four years now, Mansoor has been confined to an isolation cell, deprived of basic necessities and denied his rights as prisoner under international human rights law, to which the UAE purports to adhere.

In 2019, after he had exhausted all the means available to him to claim his rights as a prisoner, Mansoor embarked on two hunger strikes, six months apart. Among his demands were an end to solitary confinement and access to necessities, including blankets and personal hygiene products. While the hunger strikes did prompt the authorities to allow him to call his wife and mother briefly twice a month and access to sunlight and exercise three times a week, the authorities did not grant him reprieve from the indefinite and brutal solitary confinement they have subjected him to since his arrest in March 2017. 

In 2015, Mansoor received the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.

https://www.martinennalsaward.org/hrd/ahmed-mansoor/

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/01/27/persecution-ahmed-mansoor/how-united-arab-emirates-silenced-its-most-famous-human