Dubai — rules to know before you go

Dubai — rules to know before you go

AN ADVOCACY group has taken the extraordinary step of warning tourists not to report rape in the United Arab Emirates as a British rape victim faces jail for going to police about her own attack.

Detained in Dubai, a UK-based group that helps victims of injustice in the UAE, said tourists and expats shouldn’t report rape and other crimes in the Gulf state due to “manipulation when it comes to criminal accusations” and the “racist” preconceptions against Western tourists.

The warning comes after a British woman who told Dubai police she was gang-raped by a group of British nationals was charged with extramarital sex, an offence punishable by jail time and flogging.

Radha Stirling, founder and director of Detained in Dubai, described the treatment of rape victims in the UAE as “tremendously disturbing”.

“The UAE has a long history of penalising rape victims,” she said.

“Victims go to (the police) expecting justice, and end up being prosecuted. They not only invalidate their victimisation, they actually punish them for it.

“It is still not safe for victims to report these crimes to the police without the risk of suffering a double punishment.”

The family of the British woman said she was on holiday and preparing to travel on to Australia when she was reportedly raped by two British men in a Dubai hotel room.

Her passport was confiscated and she has been staying with a British family in Dubai as she awaits trail.

“They have taken her passport as lawyers thrash it out. She is staying with an English family but she is absolutely terrified,” a family friend told The Sun.

“She went to the police as the victim as one of the worst ordeals imaginable but she is being treated as the criminal.”

Ms Stirling said the woman’s alleged attackers have since returned to the UK without charge since the incident, which was believed to be filmed on a mobile phone.

The woman’s family have launched a crowd-funding appeal to raise $42,000 to cover her legal costs.

“Please help my daughter, she is being held in a prison cell in a foreign country for up to one year if we can’t bail her out,” the family wrote on the fundraising page.

Dubai police have refused to comment further on the case but a police source said in relation to the case that foreign visitors “must learn the law in the UAE before they come to visit”, The Times reported.

Amnesty International said the case revealed a deep-rooted prejudice against women in the UAE.

“The authorities continue to fail survivors of such violence by treating women who have been raped as criminals, instead of investigating and prosecuting suspected perpetrators,” Amnesty International researcher Drewery Dyke said.

In a similar incident in 2008, Australian woman Alicia Gali was charged after reporting her own rape in Dubai and served eight months of a one-year jail sentence.

In 2013, a Norwegian woman was sentenced to 16 months in jail after she went to Dubai police to report she was raped during a business trip.

And in June this year, a Dutch tourist who said she was raped in the Gulf country of Qatar was held for close to three months before being handed a one-year suspended sentence for having extramarital sex.

The Department of Foreign Affairs’ travel advice for the UAE notes that as sex outside of marriage was illegal in the country, it was “possible that victims of sexual assault may face criminal prosecution rather than being considered the victim of a crime”.