title: Dutch–Portuguese War

text: At the same time, the Dutch organized incursions against the Portuguese possessions in Africa in order to take control of the slave trade and complete the trade triangle that would ensure the economic prosperity of New Holland.


title: Dutch–Portuguese War

text: In 1626, a Dutch expedition to take Elmina was almost wiped out in an ambush by the Portuguese, but in 1637, Elmina fell to the Dutch. In 1641 (after a truce between Portugal and the Netherlands had been signed), the Dutch captured the island of São Tomé and before the end of 1642, the rest of Portuguese Gold Coast followed.


title: Dutch–Portuguese War

text: In August 1641 the Dutch formed a three-way alliance with the Kingdom of Kongo and Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, and with their assistance captured Luanda and Benguela, though without preventing the Portuguese from retreating inland into strongholds like Massangano, Ambaca, and Muxima. With a steady source of slaves now secure, the Dutch abstained from further action, presuming that their allies would suffice against the Portuguese. Nonetheless, lacking artillery and firearms, Queen Nzinga and the Kongo proved unable to decisively defeat the Portuguese and their cannibalistic Imbangala allies.


title: Dutch–Portuguese War

text: As the Portuguese were unable to send sufficient reinforcements to their colonies due to the ongoing Restoration War in mainland Portugal, in 1648 the Portuguese governor of the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador Correia de Sá, organized a military expedition to retake Luanda from the Dutch, directly from Brazil.


title: Dutch–Portuguese War

text: In early August, the fleet reached Luanda, where de Sá communicated to the Dutch garrison that since the Dutch would not respect the terms of the truce, the Portuguese felt no obligation to do so either. Although the Portuguese were outnumbered, a swift display of force achieved on August 15 the surrender of Luanda and all Dutch forces in Angola. Upon hearing of the fall of Luanda, Queen Nzinga retreated to Matamba, while the Dutch in São Tomé abandoned the island, which was reoccupied


title: Dutch–Portuguese War

text: The Dutch, determined to recover or retain their territories, postponed the end of the conflict. But as they had to contend with the English at the same time they eventually decided to offer terms.


title: Gray Television

text: Gray Television, Inc. is an American publicly traded television broadcasting company based in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1946 by James Harrison Gray as Gray Communications Systems, the company owns or operates 180 stations across the United States in 113 markets. Its station base consists all ranges of media markets, from as large as Atlanta, to one of the smallest markets, North Platte, Nebraska.


title: Gray Television

text: James H. Gray started his communication business with the purchase of "The Herald Publishing Company" (a company founded in 1897 to promote The Albany Herald, a newspaper that started publication in 1891), in 1946 after he returned from World War II. Gray launched WALB-TV in 1954. In 1960, Gray purchased WJHG-TV in Panama City, Florida, and followed it later in the decade with KTVE serving Monroe, Louisiana and southern Arkansas.


title: Gray Television

text: In 1986 Gray died, leaving his 50.5% share of the stock in a trust for his children with stipulation that they run the business together, sell their stock with each other or sell out together. This caused difficulties as two of the three wanted to sell with the third unable to purchase. In 1991, to break the stalemate, the board of directors had the company purchase 25% of their shares.


title: Gray Television

text: The company was then taken public on NASDAQ's small-cap market in the 2nd quarter 1992. The price per share dropped to $8. The company put itself-or any part up-for sale by the end of 1992. While the board of directors received about 40 offers, Bull Run Corporation purchased the remaining shares of the Gray siblings, who as part of the deal resigned from the board.


title: Gray Television

text: New management was put in place at all three TV stations. Bull Run Corporation, primarily owned by J. Mack Robinson, decided to make Gray a Southeast regional media company, expanding its focus beyond the state of Georgia. Gray purchased two TV stations (WKYT-TV and WYMT) from the failed and government-seized Kentucky Central Insurance Company in September 1994 after a court challenge to the sale by Kentucky Central builder Garvice Kincaid.


title: Gray Television

text: In 1994 and 1995, Gray purchased two newspapers, the "Rockdale Citizen" (acquired May 31, 1994) and "Gwinnett Post-Tribune" (acquired January 1995; quickly renamed "Gwinnett Daily Post") and seven advertising weeklies. In 1995, the company moved its stock listing to the New York Stock Exchange. By this time, Robinson, directly or through Bull Run, owned 44% of the company's stock. Gray had started to focus on its TV station segment over the newspaper holding while TV produced more income and the newspapers' income were declining. Just months after doubling the "Daily Post"s staff, one third were laid off and a quarter of "The Albany Herald"s staff followed in January 1996. Newspaper leaders resigned during this period–from the corporate president in late 1995 to the "Citizens" editor and publisher.


title: Gray Television

text: In 1996, Gray added additional TV stations while entering additional communication industry segments. The company was considered in 1996 by "Fortune" magazine as the 81st fastest growing company, having a 48% percent growth rate. WRDW-TV was purchased in January 1996. In September 1996 a basket purchase from First American Media, Inc., Gray got two TV stations (WCTV and WVLT-TV), Satellite and Production Business Services, which was renamed Lynqx Communications and PortaPhone paging business.


title: Gray Television

text: In August and September 1996, Gray raised additional operating funds by various means. On August 20, KTVE was sold for cash and accounts receivable. The company issued and sold Class B common stock (through a public offering), senior subordinated notes and preferred stock in September. Also, a new bank credit facility was arranged. This brought the company total to $534.5 million in available funds with $409.5 million directly available.


title: Gray Television

text: Also in September 1996, Ralph Gabbard, the newly named president and CEO, died from a heart attack at age 50. Robinson, Bull Run's chair, took over as interim CEO and president with Bull Run CEO Robert Prather as interim executive vice-president, acquisitions.


title: Gray Television

text: With its additional funds, Gray continued purchasing in 1997 with two announcements in January and February. The company bought Gulflink Communications, Inc., a transportable satellite uplink business based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in April 1997 to go along with Lynqx. With Raycom Media acquiring a station from AFLAC Broadcast Group, Inc., forcing them to sell WITN-TV to Gray, which was finalized on August 1, 1997. The "Gwinnett Daily Post" increased circulation in 1997 through a deal with Genesis Cable Communications to provide the paper to its metro Atlanta subscribers at Genesis's expense.


title: Gray Television

text: In 1998, Gray started to expand beyond its Southeast region. As the company agreed to purchase the Busse Broadcasting Corporation, which owned KOLN, KGIN-TV and WEAU. Gray's ownership of a newspaper and TV station in Albany, Georgia while grandfathered was examined under the Media cross-ownership rule of the FCC due to this potential purchase. WALB was thus sold to Liberty Corp.'s Cosmos Broadcasting in August 1998.


title: Gray Television

text: In 2002, Robinson became chairman and CEO, his son-in-law Hilton Howell vice chairman, Prather president/COO and Jim Ryan senior vice president. They had Gray purchase 14 Benedek Broadcasting stations while that company was in bankruptcy.


title: Gray Television

text: In 2006, the company spun off its five daily newspapers and wireless messaging business into the newly formed Triple Crown Media, later (in 2010) renamed Southern Community Newspapers. A new strategy of purchasing stations in college towns or capitals was put into place.


title: Gray Television

text: The company had overpaid for a pair of stations and was over leveraged like many other station groups entering the Great Recession. Advertising revenues dropped. The twin problems caused its shares to trade at its lowest at 16 cents in 2008, thus the NYSE indicated they might delist the company. Loan covenants could have forced the company into default. Robinson stepped down with Howell replacing him in 2008.


title: Gray Television

text: On July 30, 2009, Gray was awarded a contract to manage seven Young Broadcasting-owned stations. Through December 31, 2012, Gray would earn $2.2 million and an opportunity to earn additional specified incentive fees if certain performance targets were exceeded.


title: Gray Television

text: Prather left the company in 2013 and Howell took over the president title. On November 4, 2013, Gray Television announced that it would purchase Yellowstone Holdings for $23 million, adding local stations: KGNS-TV, KGWN, KCWY, and KCHY-LP. Three weeks later, on November 20, Gray announced it would purchase Hoak Media and Parker Broadcasting for $335 million, and North Dakota's Fox affiliate KNDX/KXND for $7.5 million. As part of the deal, stations KAQY, KHAS-TV, and KXJB, were proposed to be sold to Excalibur Broadcasting and operated by Gray under a "local marketing agreements". On December 19, it was announced that stations KREX-TV and WMBB would be sold to Nexstar Broadcasting Group, while KFQX would be sold to Mission Broadcasting. On March 25, 2014, Prime Cities Broadcasting, owner of KNDX/KXND, requested that the FCC dismiss the sale of KNDX/KXND to Excalibur.


title: Gray Television

text: The sale was completed on June 13, 2014. However, some stations were forced to go off the air and their programming was moved to a multicast stream on adjacent channels, due to some stations being unable to receive regulatory approval, after the FCC's ruling on joint sales agreements. Those silent stations would then be sold off to minority interest, pending FCC approval.


title: Gray Television

text: On July 24, 2014, SJL Broadcasting announced that it would sell WJRT-TV and WTVG to Gray, for $128 million. The sale was completed on September 15.


title: Gray Television

text: In July 2015, Gray closed its accounting and human resources offices in Albany (housed in the same building as The Albany Herald), combining them with the corporate offices in Atlanta.


title: Gray Television

text: In September 2015, Gray announced that it would acquire the television and radio stations of Schurz Communications for $442.5 million. It also purchased KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, Iowa from the locally owned Gazette Company, who owned the station from its sign-on in 1953.


title: Gray Television

text: In January 2016, Gray Television opened a national news bureau in Washington, D.C., led by former APTV journalist Jacqueline Policastro. The bureau was designed to provide enhanced coverage of national political issues for Gray's local stations.


title: Gray Television

text: On May 13, 2016, Gray announced that it would acquire WDTV and WVFX in Clarksburg, West Virginia from Withers Broadcasting for $26.5 million. On June 3, 2016, it was announced that Gray would acquire two stations that were spun-off from the Nexstar-Media General merger; KWQC-TV in Davenport, Iowa and WBAY-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin for $270 million. On February 16, 2017, Gray announced that it would acquire WABI-TV in Bangor, Maine and WCJB-TV in Gainesville, Florida from Diversified Communications for $85 million. On May 4, 2017, Gray announced its intent to acquire WCAX-TV in Burlington, Vermont from Mount Mansfield Television for $29 million.


title: Gray Television

text: In April 2017, Gray Television filed a lawsuit against Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, founders of the Found Footage Festival, for fraud and copyright infringement, after having booked an appearance on the morning show of a Gray station as a fake strongman act, "Chop and Steele", and utilizing the footage during their show. The parties later agreed to a settlement.


title: Gray Television

text: On May 21, 2018, Gray Television entered into an agreement to acquire KNHL from Legacy Broadcasting for $475,000. Gray intended to turn KNHL into a satellite of its NBC affiliate KSNB-TV.


title: Gray Television

text: On June 25, 2018, Gray Television announced its intent to acquire Raycom Media for $3.65 billion, pending regulatory approval. The combined company would be led by Raycom's current president and CEO Pat LaPlatney, with current Gray CEO Hilton Howell acting as executive chairman and co-CEO. The acquisition, which Gray expected to close in late 2018, would give Gray 142 stations in 92 markets, making Gray the third-largest owner of television stations in the United States, with a total market share of 24%.


title: Gray Television

text: Although Gray foresaw that the acquisition would receive regulatory approval quickly, due to limited market overlap between the two companies and its still-relatively low total market reach post-acquisition. Gray would divest nine stations in markets where Gray and Raycom both already owned stations, including WTNZ, WTOL, KXXV, WTXL, WFXG, KWES-TV, WPGX, WSWG, and WDFX-TV. The sale was approved by the FCC on December 20, 2018. The deal was completed on January 2, 2019.


title: Gray Television

text: Gray announced on April 24, 2019, a joint venture with Grand Ole Opry Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of Ryman Hospitality Properties, a former owner of The Nashville Network. The services would consist of a broadcast diginet and an OTT streaming platform. The joint venture is based in Nashville under general manager Drew Riefenberger. Gray contributed distribution and marketing capabilities, multicast knowledge and affiliate Gray TV stations. The Circle TV network made its launch on January 1, 2020.


title: Gray Television

text: On February 1, 2021, Gray Television announced its intent to acquire all Quincy Media's broadcasting properties for $925 million in cash. To comply with federal regulators, Gray would divest Quincy stations in Tucson; Harrisburg, Illinois; Waterloo/Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Madison, La Crosse, and Wausau in Wisconsin over to Allen Media Group. Gray's acquisition of Quincy Media was completed on August 2.


title: Gray Television

text: In March 2021, Gray Television revealed plans to purchase a shuttered General Motors plant in Atlanta suburb Doraville, Georgia and transform the site into a media production community called Assembly. The "studio city" is set to include multiple film studios, as well as apartments, townhomes, a hotel, corporate offices, restaurants and retail space. In September 2021, Gray Television purchased Doraville-based Third Rail Studios for $27.5 million.


title: Gray Television

text: On May 3, 2021, Gray announced plans to buy the television division of Meredith Corporation for $2.7 billion. If approved, Gray would sell WJRT-TV to acquire competing station WNEM-TV, owned by Meredith. It is revealed that Allen Media Group would purchase WJRT-TV in Flint for $70 million. The sale was completed on December 1.


title: Gray Television

text: On July 22, 2009, a New York bankruptcy judge approved a plan transferring ownership of Young Broadcasting and its stations to the company's secured lenders. The plan included Gray Television coming in as an outside party to advise on the operations of Young-owned stations in seven markets through December 2012. The new Young Broadcasting still held the final say on overall operations for their stations, including programming and personnel.


title: Gray Television

text: Young Broadcasting would retain ownership of all its stations, including three stations that Gray would not operate: KRON-TV in San Francisco, California, WATE-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, and WLNS-TV in Lansing, Michigan, the latter two due to Gray already owning stations in those markets. Gray considered the possibility of purchasing the Young stations if the group went on the market.


title: Gray Television

text: The agreement ended without any further extensions on December 31, 2012, and Young agreed to a merger with Media General in mid-2013. Gray would eventually purchase KWQC and WBAY outright when Nexstar Broadcasting Group acquired Media General in 2017, as Nexstar already owned WHBF-TV and WFRV-TV in each market. At that time, Gray had already acquired Sioux Falls rival station KSFY. Gray would also re-enter the Richmond market when it bought WWBT in 2019, following its merger with Raycom Media, and would also re-enter the Nashville market in 2021 with WSMV-TV after acquiring the television assets of Meredith Corporation.


title: Gray Television

text: By January 20, 2016, Gray had set up their Washington News Bureau by Jacqueline Policastro to enable stations to get interviews with U.S. Senators and Representatives serving their communities. The bureau cooperates with Lilly Broadcasting's Washington bureau, previously started by Policastro, and is located at the NBC News Capitol Hill Bureau, 400 N. Capitol Street. In February 2019, Gray announced that award-winning journalist Greta Van Susteren has joined the company as its Chief National Political Analyst. Gray then announced in April 2019 Greta Van Susteren as host of a Sunday morning syndicated show, "Full Court Press with Greta Van Susteren", which was launched in September 2019.


title: Toby Young

text: Toby Daniel Moorsom Young (born 17 October 1963) is a British social commentator. He is the founder and director of the Free Speech Union, an associate editor of "The Spectator", and a former associate editor at "Quillette."


title: Toby Young

text: A graduate of the University of Oxford, Young briefly worked for "The Times", before co-founding the London magazine "Modern Review" in 1991. He edited it until financial difficulties led to its demise in 1995. His 2001 memoir, "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People", details his subsequent employment at "Vanity Fair". He then went on to write for "The Sun on Sunday", the "Daily Mail", "The Daily Telegraph", and "The Spectator". He also served as a judge in seasons five and six of the television show "Top Chef". A proponent of free schools, Young co-founded the West London Free School and served as director of the New Schools Network.


title: Toby Young

text: Young has been at the centre of several controversies. In 2015, he wrote an article in advocacy of genetically engineered intelligence, which he described as "progressive eugenics". In early January 2018, he was briefly a non-executive director on the board of the Office for Students, an appointment from which he resigned within a few days after Twitter posts, described as "misogynistic and homophobic", were uncovered. In 2020, press regulator IPSO found Young to have promoted misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic in a "Daily Telegraph" column.


title: Toby Young

text: Born in Buckinghamshire, Young was brought up in Highgate, North London, and in South Devon. His mother Sasha (1931–1993), daughter of Raisley Stewart Moorsom, a descendant of Admiral Sir Robert Moorsom, who fought at the Battle of Trafalgar, was a BBC Radio producer, artist and writer, and his father was Michael Young (later Lord Young of Dartington), a Labour life peer and pioneering sociologist who coined the word "meritocracy". Although entitled to use the style "The Hon. Toby Young", he does not.


title: Toby Young

text: Young was educated at Creighton School (now Fortismere School), Muswell Hill and King Edward VI Community College, Totnes. Young later claimed that he was not popular at school, writing, "My only friend was a black boy called Remi, who explained that the reason he'd taken a shine to me was because he knew what it was like to be a 'nigger'." He left school at 16 having failed all but one of his O Levels, a C in English Literature, and worked under a Government Youth Training Scheme. He then retook his O Levels and went to the Sixth Form of William Ellis School, Highgate, leaving with two Bs and a C at A Level. Despite thus failing to achieve the college's BBB offer, he was given a place at Brasenose College, Oxford. Young said he was sent an acceptance letter by mistake, as well as a letter of rejection from the admissions tutor Harry Judge. In an article he wrote for "The Spectator", he said that his father phoned Judge to clarify the situation – Judge was in a meeting with the PPE tutors at the time, and after some discussion, they decided to offer Young a place owing to a moral obligation the mistaken acceptance created. He had been given a conditional offer of three Bs plus an O Level pass in a foreign language under a scheme to give access to comprehensive pupils.


title: Toby Young

text: Young graduated in 1986 with a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and then worked for "The Times" for a six-month period as a news trainee until he was fired, for, according to Young himself, hacking the computer system: impersonating the editor Charles Wilson and circulating senior executives' salaries to others around the building. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and studied at Harvard and spent a two-year period at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he carried out research for a PhD which he left before completing.


title: Toby Young

text: In 1991, Young co-founded and co-edited the "Modern Review" with Julie Burchill and her then husband Cosmo Landesman. Its motto was "Low culture for highbrows". "The whole enterprise was driven by one fairly simple idea", Young said in 2005. "And that was that critics had a responsibility to take the best popular culture as seriously as the best high culture".


title: Toby Young

text: Four years later the magazine was close to financial collapse and Young closed it down, angering his principal financial backer Peter York, as well as Burchill and staff writer Charlotte Raven. Burchill had tried to replace Young as editor with Raven. "Ultimately the reason we fell out is because our relationship began as a kind of mentor-apprentice, and that was a kind of relationship which Julie was comfortable with. It was only when I succeeded in getting out from under her shadow that our relationship deteriorated", Young said in 2005.


title: Toby Young

text: Young moved to New York City shortly afterwards to work for "Vanity Fair" accepting an invitation from its editor, Graydon Carter. In the time he wrote for the magazine he contributed 3,000 words, but was paid $85,000. After being sacked by "Vanity Fair" in 1998, he stayed in New York for two more years, working as a columnist for the "New York Press", before returning to the UK in 2000. A memoir of these years, "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People", was published in 2001.


title: Toby Young

text: Following Jack Davenport, Young performed in the West End one-man stage adaptation of "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" in 2004. Theatre critic Lyn Gardner gave it a one star review commenting that "The curious thing about this is that Young's day job is as theatre critic of the Spectator. You would think he might have developed some respect for the job that actors do. Clearly not. But then, neither does he appear to have picked up any tips on acting along the way." A review in The Stage disagreed, saying "Despite Young's previous thespic experience being the only student at Anna Scher’s drama school not to get a part in Grange Hill and having been fired after a week as an extra on the film Another Country, he gives a thoroughly convincing performance as himself…". The Evening Standard also praised his performance. In 2005, he co-wrote (with fellow "Spectator" journalist Lloyd Evans) a sex farce about the David Blunkett/Kimberley Quinn intrigue and the "Sextator" affairs of Boris Johnson and Rod Liddle called "Who's the Daddy?" It was named as the Best New Comedy at the 2006 Theatregoers' Choice Awards. The following year "A Right Royal Farce", Young and Evans' play about sexual antics of the British royal family was poorly received by the press. Young said of the play "It was an unqualified disaster". It received scathing reviews from the "Evening Standard" and "The Guardian".


title: Toby Young

text: From 2002 to 2007, Young wrote a restaurant column for the "Evening Standard" and later a restaurant column for "The Independent on Sunday". In addition to serving as a judge on "Top Chef", Young has competed in the Channel 4 TV series "Come Dine with Me", appeared as one of the panel of food critics in the 2008 BBC Two series "Eating with the Enemy" and served as a judge on "Hell's Kitchen".


title: Toby Young

text: Young is an associate editor of "The Spectator", where he writes a weekly column, the editor of "Spectator Life" and a regular contributor to the "Daily Mail" and "The Daily Telegraph". His "Telegraph" blog was long-listed for the 2012 George Orwell Prize for blogging. He was a political columnist for "The Sun on Sunday" for its first 11 months.


title: Toby Young

text: During the 2015 Labour leadership election, he encouraged readers of the politically conservative "Daily Telegraph" to join the Labour party and support Jeremy Corbyn, who Young thought was the weakest candidate.


title: Toby Young

text: In February 2020, Young co-founded the Free Speech Union. In November 2021 he was awarded the 2021 Contrarian Prize.


title: Toby Young

text: In 2019, Young supported Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party. In 2020, he said he was wrong to back Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party. In 2022, he backed Boris for the leader of the Conservative Party again.


title: Toby Young

text: Young was a proposer and co-founder of the West London Free School, the first free school to sign a funding agreement with the Education Secretary, and is now a trustee of The West London Free School Academy Trust, the charitable trust that manages the school. The school was founded at Palingswick House, which displaced over 20 voluntary organisations previously located there. He stood down as CEO of the school in May 2016 after admitting that he did not realise how difficult it was going to be to run. The national press coverage of the school having four headteachers in the space of six years was linked to the higher profile for the school engendered by its links to Young. The trust opened a primary school in Hammersmith in 2013, a second primary in Earls Court in 2014 and a third primary in Kensington in 2016. Young is a follower of the American educationalist E. D. Hirsch and an advocate of a traditional, knowledge-based approach to education.


title: Toby Young

text: In 2012, Young wrote an article in "The Spectator" criticising the emphasis on "inclusion" in state schools, saying that the word "inclusive" was "one of those ghastly, politically correct words that have survived the demise of New Labour. Schools have got to be 'inclusive' these days. That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library...". Young denied that he was attacking the provision of equal access to mainstream schools for people with disabilities, saying he was only referring to the alleged "dumbing down" of the curriculum.


title: Toby Young

text: In 2015, the "London Review of Books"s cover story for its May 7 issue was an article written by British journalist Dawn Foster criticising the free school movement. In a letter to the "London Review of Books", Young took issue with Foster's interpretation of free schools data and made claims that were challenged by the author Michael Rosen, journalist Melissa Benn, and education researcher Janet Downs in further letters written to the publication. Foster responded to Young in the "London Review of Books" letters refuting Young's criticism and wrote:Creaming off the children of more affluent parents constitutes social segregation; so too does the existence of religious free schools. Young seems to think he is held in high regard by free school advocates. When I mentioned his name in the course of interviewing a former Department for Education employee for the piece, my interviewee headbutted the restaurant table in exasperation. I have found the sentiment, if not the gesture, to be common among his ideological comrades.On 29 October 2016, Young was appointed Director of the New Schools Network, a charity founded in 2009 to support groups setting up free schools. He resigned from this role in March 2018.


title: Toby Young

text: In addition to the book "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People", Young is the author of "The Sound of No Hands Clapping" (2006), "How to Set Up a Free School" (2011) and "What Every Parent Needs to Know: How to Help Your Child Get the Most Out of Primary School" (2014), which he co-wrote with Miranda Thomas.


title: Toby Young

text: British producer Stephen Woolley and his wife Elizabeth Karlsen produced the film adaptation "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People" (2008) in conjunction with FilmFour. Young, who co-produced the film, was played by Simon Pegg. It was released in Britain on 3 October 2008 and reached the number one spot at the box office in its opening week. The film received mostly negative reviews and was a commercial failure, losing over £8 million.


title: Toby Young

text: Young co-produced and co-wrote "When Boris Met Dave" (2009), a drama-documentary for Channel 4 about the relationship between Eton and Oxford University contemporaries Mayor Boris Johnson and Conservative Party Leader PM David Cameron. It was first broadcast on More4 on 7 October 2009 and later shown on Channel 4.


title: Toby Young

text: In 2015, Young wrote an article for the Australian magazine "Quadrant" entitled "The fall of meritocracy". Under a section titled "Progressive eugenics" he discussed developments in genetically engineered intelligence, and proposed that should the technology for selecting embryos for high intelligence become practicable, it could be provided "free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs.” He argued this "could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite," through a mechanism that should be acceptable to political conservatives and also argued that "This is a kind of eugenics that should appeal to liberals — progressive eugenics." Young has maintained that criticism of him as a eugenicist is "based on a deliberate misreading" of the article and that "If 'eugenics' is forced sterilisation, what I was proposing was the opposite — free IVF for the poor."


title: Toby Young

text: Young attended the London Conference on Intelligence at University College London (UCL) in 2017, which was described by the media and a number of politicians as a "secret eugenics conference". Young said that he attended the conference as a journalist to report about it (which he later did), in preparation for the "super-respectable" International Society for Intelligence Research conference in Montreal in July 2017 at which he gave a speech, which was later published.


title: Toby Young

text: In January 2018 Young was announced as one of the non-executive members of the board for the new Office for Students (OfS), a body intended to ensure institutions in higher education are accountable. "The Guardian" later revealed that claims (made not by Young himself, but by the Department for Education) about Young's teaching posts at the University of Cambridge and Harvard were misleading as although Young had taught at the universities, he had not been appointed to an academic post. The appointment became the subject of controversy when Twitter posts, described as "misogynistic and homophobic", were uncovered. He resigned a week later, stating that his appointment had "become a distraction" counteracting the "vital work" of the OfS. Shortly afterwards he resigned also as a Fulbright Commissioner.


title: Toby Young

text: An inquiry was launched shortly after Young's resignation by Peter Riddell, the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Riddell said the OfS panel report to ministers about Young "made no mention of Mr Young’s history of controversial comments and use of social media". The disquiet which followed "makes a strong case for more extensive due diligence inquiries".


title: Toby Young

text: In March 2020 during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, Young wrote in "The Critic" that he "suspect[ed] the Government has overreacted to the coronavirus crisis", expressing worry about the "economic cost". In reference to the modelling of a team at Imperial College London led by Neil Ferguson, he wrote: "spending £350 billion to prolong the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people is an irresponsible use of taxpayer's money." Peter Jukes wrote that Young's views could be "outright deadly" in a pandemic; Darren McGarvey compared Young's views to austerity.


title: Toby Young

text: Young, who initiated the "Lockdown Sceptics" newsletter (now retitled "The Daily Sceptic") called for stopping the lockdown before 14 April 2020. Saying that he had probably contracted the virus, he wrote that "if the Government does end the lockdown, and it turns out that by the time I require critical care the NHS cannot accommodate me, I won't regret writing this". He argued his own death would be "acceptable collateral damage". Young's view contrasted with the scientific recommendations for lockdown policy in the UK.


title: Toby Young

text: In June 2020 he wrote that "the virus has all but disappeared". In January 2021 he appeared on "Newsnight" and when he was challenged about his comments about the virus said "hands up, I got that wrong" and made arguments against lockdowns.


title: Toby Young

text: On 14 January 2021 the British press regulator IPSO ruled that an article Young had written for "The Daily Telegraph" in July 2020 was "significantly misleading" and that the newspaper had failed to take care not to publish inaccurate information. In the article, Young claimed that common cold coronaviruses gave people immunity against SARS-CoV-2, and that in July 2020 London had almost achieved herd immunity. Neither claim was supported by scientists at the time. IPSO ordered the newspaper to publish a correction. "The Telegraph" removed the article from its website and Young deleted many of his tweets about the pandemic.


title: Toby Young

text: In September 2022, PayPal shut down the accounts of Young, the Free Speech Union and "The Daily Sceptic" website. The account were closed because of breaches of PayPal's acceptable use policy, thought to be because of alleged misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. The accounts were restored later that month after extensive criticism of PayPal's actions by MPs.


title: Toby Young

text: Prior to getting married, Young employed a Russian "daily" whom he later described as "a kind of surrogate mother". Young has since complained about the difficulty of finding reliable domestic staff.


title: Toby Young

text: In 1997, Young met Caroline Bondy while living in New York. After they split up, Young gave up drinking, saying he "thought the only way I could persuade her to get back with me would be if I sobered up". He began drinking alcohol again two years later, on their wedding day in July 2001. They have four children.


title: Toby Young

text: Young has admitted using illegal drugs – specifically taking cocaine at the Groucho Club in central London, and also supplying drugs to others. He was subsequently expelled from membership of the Club in late 2001 for writing about the cocaine use of his friends whom he had supplied with the drug during a 1997 photo shoot for "Vanity Fair". Such activities are against Club rules.


title: Toby Young

text: Young has come under criticism for comments he made on Twitter, most of which were deleted upon his appointment to the Board of the Office for Students. Young said that he posted more than 56,000 tweets, of which 8,439 remained as at January 2018.


title: Toby Young

text: These included what an "Evening Standard" editorial called "an obsession with commenting on the anatomy of women in the public eye". He referred on Twitter to the cleavage of unnamed female MPs sitting behind Ed Miliband in the Commons in 2011 and 2012. When later challenged by Stella Creasy on "Newsnight" he said of the second such incident: "It wasn't my proudest moment". Other remarks included slurs described as homophobic, including a claim that George Clooney is "as queer as a coot".


title: Toby Young

text: One tweet by Young was in response to a BBC Comic Relief appeal in 2009 for starving Kenyan children. During the broadcast, a Twitter user commented that she had "gone through about 5 boxes of kleenex" whilst watching. Toby Young replied: "Me too, I wanked so much in ages". He has expressed remorse for his "politically incorrect" tweets.


title: Toby Young

text: Young is reported to have edited his own Wikipedia page 282 times over the course of six years. In October 2020, he wrote an article in "The Spectator" criticising "lazy journalists [for whom] Wikipedia is the only thing they read when 'researching' an article" and stating that "Wikipedia has a strong left-wing bias — which might explain why the page about me reads as if it's been written by Owen Jones."


title: Glycera (annelid)

text: The genus Glycera is a group of polychaetes (bristle worms) commonly known as bloodworms. They are typically found on the bottom of shallow marine waters, and some species (e.g. common bloodworms) can grow up to 35 cm (14 in) in length.


title: Glycera (annelid)

text: Bloodworms have a creamy pink color, as their pale skin allows their red body fluids that contain haemoglobin to show through. This is the origin of the name "bloodworm". At the 'head', bloodworms have four small antennae and small fleshy projections called parapodia running down their bodies. Bloodworms can grow up to in length.


title: Glycera (annelid)

text: Bloodworms are carnivorous. They feed by extending a large proboscis that bears four hollow jaws. The jaws are connected to glands that supply venom which they use to kill their prey, and their bite is painful even to a human. They are preyed on by other worms, bottom-feeding fish, crustacea, and gulls.


title: Glycera (annelid)

text: Reproduction occurs in midsummer, when the warmer water temperature and lunar cycle among other factors triggers sexually mature worms to transform into a non-feeding stage called the epitoke. With enlarged parapodia, they swim to the surface of the water where both sexes release gametes, and then die.


title: Glycera (annelid)

text: The first stage in many forms of bloodworm is a zooplanktonic stage followed by the benthic instar where the familiar segmented red larvae develop protected by silk tubes made in the bottom silt. These larvae progress from tiny pale opaque worms to the larger red larvae of 3 to 10 centimeters in length or longer over a period as short as 2–3 weeks in optimum conditions.


title: Glycera (annelid)

text: These animals are unique in that they contain a lot of copper without being poisoned. Their jaws are unusually strong since they too contain the metal in the form of a copper-based chloride biomineral, known as atacamite, in crystalline form. It is theorized that this copper is used as a catalyst for its venomous bite. In "Glycera dibranchiata", the jaws are a composite of melanin and 10% copper.


title: Glycera (annelid)

text: "Fishing for Allergens: Bloodworm-Induced Asthma" study at the Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology (AACI) site


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: Hāshim ibn ʿAbd Manāf (; ), born ʿAmr al-ʿUlā (), was the great-grandfather of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the progenitor of the ruling Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca. At some point in his life before his father's death, ‘Amr chose for himself the name "Hāshim", as it was the name God used for Abraham (‘Amr was a Hanif, follower of the "religion of Abraham"). The narrations from Islamic hagiographists to explain this name change are varied: A narration suggests that `Amr was called Hashim because Hashim translates as "pulverizer" in Arabic-- As a generous man, he initiated the practice of providing crumbled bread in broth that was later adapted for the pilgrims to the Ka'aba in Mecca. Another narration claims the name derives from the Arabic root "Hashm", "to save the starving", because he arranged for the feeding of the people of Mecca during a seasonal famine, and he thus came to be known as "the man who fed the starved" ().


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: Islamic hagiographers give an exotic narration concerning the birth of Hashim. Some consider it to be a very bloody and cruel one, indeed. This narration states that Hashim and 'Abd Shams were conjoined twins born with Hashim's leg attached to his twin brother's head. It says that they had struggled in their mother's womb seeking to be firstborn. Their birth was remembered for Hashim being born with one of his toes pressed into the younger twin brother's forehead. Legend says that their father, 'Abd Manaf ibn Qusai, separated his conjoined sons with a sword and that some priests believed that the blood that had flown between them signified wars between their progeny (confrontations did occur between Bani al'Abbas and Bani Ummaya ibn 'Abd Shams in the year 750 CE). The astrologers of Arabia predicted that Abd Manaf had committed a grave error when he separated both of them by means of a sword. That which he had done was not regarded by them as a good omen.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: Hashim was the son of Abd Manaf, who argued with his brother 'Abd ad-Dar over the inheritance. 'Abd ad-Dar was supported by their cousins Makhzum, Sahm, Jumah, their uncle Adi and their families. Abd Manaf contested his inheritance and was supported by their nephew Asad, their uncle Zuhrah ibn Kilab, their father's uncle Taym ibn Murrah, and al-Harith ibn Fihr. The effects of this conflict continued among their descendants, especially and affected the internal history of Mecca right up to Muhammad's time.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: The conflict escalated under Hashim, who demanded that the rights be transferred from the clan of Abd ad-Dar to his clan. Those who supported Hashim and his brothers were the descendants of Zuhrah and Taym ibn Murrah, and all Qusay's descendants except those of the eldest line. The descendants of Makhzum and of the other remoter cousins maintained that the rights should remain in the family of Abd ad-Dar.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: While assembled at the Ka'aba, Hashim and his brothers and all their allies dipped their hands in a bowl of rich perfume with nutmeg powder and swore that they would never abandon one another, rubbing their scented hands over the stone of the Ka'aba in confirmation of their pact. Hashim and his allies were thereafter known as the ""Hilf al-Mutayyabun"" ("Alliance of the Scented Ones"), while their rivals also swore an oath of union and organised themselves into the ""Hilf al-Ahlaf"" ("Alliance of the Confederates"). As neither side wanted a full-scale conflict, they reached a compromise whereby The Scented Ones retained control of the charity tax and the food and drink for pilgrims, where as the Confederates retained the keys to the Ka'aba and the running of the House of Assembly. Hashim's brothers agreed that he should have the responsibility of providing for the pilgrims. Their descendants in the clans named after them tended to keep this old alliance.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: Hashim was accepted as the overall leader, with the responsibility of providing for the pilgrims in the Ka’aba precincts, with the support of his brothers 'Abd Shams and Muttalib, and his half-brother Nawfal. The only person who challenged Hashim's authority was Umayyah, the son of his brother 'Abd Shams, but he had no real support and shifted to live out his life in Syria. Makkah became the acknowledged capital of Arabia, and markets were established around the city to deal with all the business.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: Hashim was held in much honour, both at home and abroad. It was Amr who first realised the potential for his family of taking part in the lucrative trade between Syria and Egypt that passed through Arabia. Trading was the most important means of livelihood for the inhabitants of Mecca, a barren 'valley without cultivation'.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: He initiated and established the two great trade caravan journeys of Quraish from Mecca, the Caravan of Winter to Yemen and the Caravan of Summer to north-west Arabia, and beyond it to Palestine and Syria, which were then under Byzantine rule as part of the Roman Empire. After obtaining privileges from the Ghassanid king of Syria, even went in person to Byzantium and procured an edict from the Byzantine Roman Caesar, exempting Quraish from duties or taxes when operating in the countries under his domain. Caesar also wrote to the King Negus of Abyssinia to admit the Quraish there for trade, and Hashim's brother 'Abd Shams had a special permit with him. Muttalib had his treaty with the Himyarites of Yemen, and their half-brother Nawfal with the Persian governments of Iraq and Iran.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: He commenced by going in person to Aden in Yemen to meet the ships coming from India, purchased the stock and transported it first to Mecca and then on to Syria, Gaza or Egypt. There he bought up goods of local manufacture and brought them back to Mecca, mainly selling them at the various Arab markets and fairs. Thus, the Quraish engaged in trade in Yemen, Syria and Ankara which allowed them to flourish economically. The Quraysh were so respected and popular that they felt no fears for their caravans being robbed or harmed along the way, and the various tribes did not even attempt to charge them the usual heavy transit taxes they demanded from other caravans.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: He was generous to a fault, and it was his practical compassion in one year of drought that earned him his famous nickname of "Hashim, the Crusher". This was not for crushing or oppressing anyone, but because when the people were starving and emaciated he provided food at his own expense for the entire population of Mecca, personally fetching an immense stock of flour from Syria by camel-caravan, then slaughtering the camels and crushing the bread and meat to provide a soup-kitchen for his people. His descendants are still proudly called Hashemites to this day.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: According to Muslim tradition, Hashim died after falling ill on a journey returning from Syria, in Gaza, Palestine in 497. According to tradition, Hashim's tomb is located beneath the dome of Sayed al-Hashim Mosque in the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza which is named in his honor. The mosque itself was built around the 12th century.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: His father was 'Abd Manaf ibn Qusai who according to Islamic tradition is a descendant of Ibrahim (Abraham) through his son Ismail (Ishmael). His mother was ʻĀtikah bint Murrah ibn Hilāl ibn Fālij ibn Dhakwān. Hashim had two full brothers, the elder was 'Abd Shams and younger was Muttalib who would succeed him, and half-brother Nawfal whose mother was Waqida bint Amr.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: He had at least five wives, four sons, and six daughters. His first three wives were his grandmother Hubba bint Hulail's niece Qaylah (or Hind) bint Amr ibn Malik of the Banu Khuza'a, Halah (Hind) bint Amr ibn Thalabah al-Khazrajiyah, and a woman from the Banu Quda'a, the people of Qusai's stepfather who had been so supportive of his cause. For his fourth wife, he married his father's widow, Waqida bint Amr (Abu Adiy) al-Maziniyyah, who was the mother of his half-brother Nawfal. His fifth wife was Salma bint Amr, a woman from Yathrib, one of the most influential women of the Banu Khazraj tribe and the daughter of 'Amr of Banu Najjar clan.


title: Hashim ibn Abd Manaf

text: By Qaylah, he had a son Asad (Ali's maternal grandfather). By Halah, he had the son Abu Saifi, and daughter Hayyah (or Hannah). By Waqida, he had the daughters Khalidah and Da'ifa. By the woman of Banu Quda'a, he had the son Nadla (or Nadh) and daughter Ash-Shifa. By Salma bint Amr he had Shaiba/'Abd al-Muṭṭalib- the paternal grandfather of Muhammad- and a daughter Ruqayyah. There was another son Sayfayyah, and another daughter Jannah.


title: Structural similarity

text: The structural similarity index measure (SSIM) is a method for predicting the perceived quality of digital television and cinematic pictures, as well as other kinds of digital images and videos. SSIM is used for measuring the similarity between two images. The SSIM index is a full reference metric; in other words, the measurement or prediction of image quality is based on an initial uncompressed or distortion-free image as reference.


title: Structural similarity

text: SSIM is a perception-based model that considers image degradation as "perceived change in structural information", while also incorporating important perceptual phenomena, including both luminance masking and contrast masking terms. The difference with other techniques such as MSE or PSNR is that these approaches estimate "absolute errors". Structural information is the idea that the pixels have strong inter-dependencies especially when they are spatially close. These dependencies carry important information about the structure of the objects in the visual scene. Luminance masking is a phenomenon whereby image distortions (in this context) tend to be less visible in bright regions, while contrast masking is a phenomenon whereby distortions become less visible where there is significant activity or "texture" in the image.


title: Structural similarity

text: The predecessor of SSIM was called "Universal Quality Index" (UQI), or "Wang–Bovik Index", which was developed by Zhou Wang and Alan Bovik in 2001. This evolved, through their collaboration with Hamid Sheikh and Eero Simoncelli, into the current version of SSIM, which was published in April 2004 in the "IEEE Transactions on Image Processing". In addition to defining the SSIM quality index, the paper provides a general context for developing and evaluating perceptual quality measures, including connections to human visual neurobiology and perception, and direct validation of the index against human subject ratings.


title: Structural similarity

text: The basic model was developed in the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) at The University of Texas at Austin and further developed jointly with the Laboratory for Computational Vision (LCV) at New York University. Further variants of the model have been developed in the Image and Visual Computing Laboratory at University of Waterloo and have been commercially marketed.


title: Structural similarity

text: SSIM subsequently found strong adoption in the image processing community and in the television and social media industries. The 2004 SSIM paper has been cited over 40,000 times according to Google Scholar, making it one of the highest cited papers in the image processing and video engineering fields. It was recognized with the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for 2009. It also received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Sustained Impact Award for 2016, indicative of a paper having an unusually high impact for at least 10 years following its publication. Because of its high adoption by the television industry, the authors of the original SSIM paper were each accorded a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award in 2015 by the Television Academy.


title: Structural similarity

text: The SSIM index is calculated on various windows of an image. The measure between two windows formula_1 and formula_2 of common size formula_3 is:


title: Structural similarity

text: The SSIM formula is based on three comparison measurements between the samples of formula_1 and formula_2: luminance (formula_24), contrast (formula_25) and structure (formula_26). The individual comparison functions are:


title: Structural similarity

text: SSIM satisfies the identity of indiscernibles, and symmetry properties, but not the triangle inequality or non-negativity, and thus is not a distance function. However, under certain conditions, SSIM may be converted to a normalized root MSE measure, which is a distance function. The square of such a function is not convex, but is locally convex and quasiconvex, making SSIM a feasible target for optimization.


title: Structural similarity

text: In order to evaluate the image quality, this formula is usually applied only on luma, although it may also be applied on color (e.g., RGB) values or chromatic (e.g. YCbCr) values. The resultant SSIM index is a decimal value between -1 and 1, where 1 indicates perfect similarity, 0 indicates no similarity, and -1 indicates perfect anti-correlation. For an image, it is typically calculated using a sliding Gaussian window of size 11x11 or a block window of size 8×8. The window can be displaced pixel-by-pixel on the image to create an SSIM quality map of the image. In the case of video quality assessment, the authors propose to use only a subgroup of the possible windows to reduce the complexity of the calculation.


title: Structural similarity

text: A more advanced form of SSIM, called Multiscale SSIM (MS-SSIM) is conducted over multiple scales through a process of multiple stages of sub-sampling, reminiscent of multiscale processing in the early vision system. It has been shown to perform equally well or better than SSIM on different subjective image and video databases.


title: Structural similarity

text: (3-SSIM) is a form of SSIM that takes into account the fact that the human eye can see differences more precisely on textured or edge regions than on smooth regions. The resulting metric is calculated as a weighted average of SSIM for three categories of regions: edges, textures, and smooth regions. The proposed weighting is 0.5 for edges, 0.25 for the textured and smooth regions. The authors mention that a 1/0/0 weighting (ignoring anything but edge distortions) leads to results that are closer to subjective ratings. This suggests that edge regions play a dominant role in image quality perception.


title: Structural similarity

text: The authors of 3-SSIM has also extended model into (4-SSIM). The edge types are further subdivided into preserved and changed edges by their distortion status. The proposed weighting is 0.25 for all four components.


title: Structural similarity

text: Structural dissimilarity (DSSIM) may be derived from SSIM, though it does not constitute a distance function as the triangle inequality is not necessarily satisfied.


title: Structural similarity

text: It is worth noting that the original version SSIM was designed to measure the quality of still images. It does not contain any parameters directly related to temporal effects of human perception and human judgment. A common practice is to calculate the average SSIM value over all frames in the video sequence. However, several temporal variants of SSIM have been developed.


title: Structural similarity

text: The complex wavelet transform variant of the SSIM (CW-SSIM) is designed to deal with issues of image scaling, translation and rotation. Instead of giving low scores to images with such conditions, the CW-SSIM takes advantage of the complex wavelet transform and therefore yields higher scores to said images. The CW-SSIM is defined as follows:


title: Structural similarity

text: Where formula_35 is the complex wavelet transform of the signal formula_1 and formula_37 is the complex wavelet transform for the signal formula_2. Additionally, formula_39 is a small positive number used for the purposes of function stability. Ideally, it should be zero. Like the SSIM, the CW-SSIM has a maximum value of 1. The maximum value of 1 indicates that the two signals are perfectly structurally similar while a value of 0 indicates no structural similarity.


title: Structural similarity

text: The SSIMPLUS index is based on SSIM and is a commercially available tool. It extends SSIM's capabilities, mainly to target video applications. It provides scores in the range of 0–100, linearly matched to human subjective ratings. It also allows adapting the scores to the intended viewing device, comparing video across different resolutions and contents.


title: Structural similarity

text: According to its authors, SSIMPLUS achieves higher accuracy and higher speed than other image and video quality metrics. However, no independent evaluation of SSIMPLUS has been performed, as the algorithm itself is not publicly available.


title: Structural similarity

text: In order to further investigate the standard "discrete" SSIM from a theoretical perspective, the "continuous" SSIM (cSSIM) has been introduced and studied in the context of Radial basis function interpolation.


title: Structural similarity

text: The r* cross-correlation metric is based on the variance metrics of SSIM. It's defined as when , when both standard deviations are zero, and when only one is zero. It has found use in analyzing human response to contrast-detail phantoms.


title: Structural similarity

text: SSIM has also been used on the gradient of images, making it "G-SSIM". G-SSIM is especially useful on blurred images.


title: Structural similarity

text: The modifications above can be combined. For example, 4-G-r* is a combination of 4-SSIM, G-SSIM, and r*. It is able to reflect radiologist preference for images much better than other SSIM variants tested.


title: Structural similarity

text: Due to its popularity, SSIM is often compared to other metrics, including more simple metrics such as MSE and PSNR, and other perceptual image and video quality metrics. SSIM has been repeatedly shown to significantly outperform MSE and its derivates in accuracy, including research by its own authors and others.


title: Structural similarity

text: A paper by Dosselmann and Yang claims that the performance of SSIM is "much closer to that of the MSE" than usually assumed. While they do not dispute the advantage of SSIM over MSE, they state an analytical and functional dependency between the two metrics. According to their research, SSIM has been found to correlate as well as MSE-based methods on subjective databases other than the databases from SSIM's creators. As an example, they cite Reibman and Poole, who found that MSE outperformed SSIM on a database containing packet-loss–impaired video. In another paper, an analytical link between PSNR and SSIM was identified.


title: Human rights in the United Arab Emirates

text: According to human rights organisations, the government of the UAE violates a number of fundamental human rights. The UAE does not have democratically elected institutions and citizens do not have the right to change their government or to form political parties. Activists and academics who criticize the regime are detained and imprisoned, and their families are often harassed by the state security apparatus. There are reports of forced disappearances in the UAE; many foreign nationals and Emirati citizens have been abducted by the UAE government and illegally detained and tortured in undisclosed locations. In numerous instances, the UAE government has tortured people in custody (especially expatriates and political dissidents),


text: and has denied their citizens the right to a speedy trial and access to counsel during official investigations.


text: According to Human Rights Watch, the UAE detains those who criticize authorities, including hundreds of activists and academics, and Emirati laws discriminate against women, migrants and LGBT individuals.


text: Flogging and stoning are legal forms of judicial punishment in the UAE due to Sharia courts. The government restricts freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the local media are censored to avoid criticising the government, government officials or royal families. As a result, the UAE routinely ranks near the bottom of many international measures for human rights and press freedom.


text: Despite being elected to the UN Council, the UAE has not signed most international human-rights and labour-rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. In November 2020, the United Arab Emirates overhauled its legal system to loosen restrictions on alcohol consumption, permit cohabitation, and increase penalty for honor killings, among other changes.


text: Although authorised, the death penalty is rarely applied in the UAE as the law requires that a panel of three judges agree on the decision of a sentence to death, which can be commuted if the family of the victim forgives the convicted or accept a financial compensation for the crime. When a family accepts financial compensation, a court can jail a convict to a minimum of three years and a maximum of seven years.


text: Since the law in the UAE is based on a dual system of Shari'a and civil courts execution, death by stoning may be ruled on only if confession and four witnesses are obtained which is legally binding for a stoning sentence to be carried out, however UAE has so far never carried out any death-by-stoning sentence.<ref name="urlUAE: Death by stoning/ flogging | Amnesty International"></ref>


text: The UAE's judicial system is derived from the civil law system and Sharia law. The court system consists of civil courts and Sharia courts. According to Human Rights Watch, UAE's civil and criminal courts apply elements of Sharia law, codified into its criminal code and family law, in a way which discriminates against women.


text: Flogging is a punishment for criminal offences such as adultery, premarital sex, and alcohol consumption. Due to Sharia courts, flogging is legal with sentences ranging from 80 to 200 lashes. Verbal abuse pertaining to a person's sexual honour is illegal and punishable by 80 lashes if it happened in public and at least one witness testify. Between 2007 and 2014, many people in the UAE were sentenced to 100 lashes. More recently in 2015, two men were sentenced to 80 lashes for hitting and insulting a woman. In 2014, an expat in Abu Dhabi was sentenced to 80 lashes for alcohol consumption and raping a toddler. Alcohol consumption for Muslims is illegal and punishable by 80 lashes; many Muslims have been sentenced to 80 lashes for alcohol consumption. Sometimes 40 lashes are given.


text: Illicit sex is sometimes penalised by 60 lashes. 80 lashes is the standard amount for anyone sentenced to flogging in several emirates. Sharia courts have penalised domestic workers with floggings. In October 2013, a Filipino housemaid was sentenced to 100 lashes for theft committed after her employer discovered her illegitimate pregnancy. Drunk-driving is strictly illegal and punishable by 80 lashes; many expats have been sentenced to 80 lashes for drunk-driving. In Abu Dhabi, a man has been sentenced to 80 lashes for being drunk while with his girlfriend on the Corniche. Under UAE law, premarital sex is punishable by 100 lashes. The law has been changed to exclude expats.


text: Stoning is a legal punishment in the UAE. In May 2014, an Asian housemaid was sentenced to death by stoning in Abu Dhabi. In 2006, an expatriate was sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery. Between 2009 and 2013, several people were sentenced to death by stoning. However, all sentences have been overturned on appeal after they retracted their confession (requirement for stoning) and no stoning has been carried out.


text: Abortion is illegal and punishable by a maximum penalty of 100 lashes and up to five years in prison. In recent years, several people have retracted their guilty plea in illicit sex cases after being sentenced to stoning or 100 lashes which is why no stoning is carried out. The punishment for committing adultery is 100 lashes for unmarried people and stoning to death for married people.


text: Apostasy from Islam is a crime punishable by death in the UAE. Blasphemy is illegal, expats involved in insulting Islam are liable for deportation. UAE incorporates "hudud" crimes of Sharia into its Penal Code – apostasy being one of them. Article 1 and Article 66 of UAE's Penal Code requires "hudud" crimes to be punished with the death penalty. No one has been executed for apostasy.


text: Emirati women must receive permission from male guardian to marry and remarry. The requirement is derived from Sharia, and has been federal law since 2005. In all emirates, it is illegal for Muslim women to marry non-Muslims. In the UAE, a marriage union between a Muslim woman and non-Muslim man is punishable by law, since it is considered a form of fornication.


text: Homosexuality is illegal and is a crime that is punishable with death, life in prison, floggings, fines, deportation, chemical castration, forced psychological treatments, honor killings, vigilante executions, beatings, forced anal examinations, forced hormone injections, and torture.


text: Kissing in public is illegal and can result in deportation. Expats in Dubai have been deported for kissing in public. In Abu Dhabi, people have been sentenced to 80 lashes for kissing in public and being drunk.


text: The Sharia-based personal status law regulates matters such as marriage, divorce and child custody. The Sharia-based personal status law is applied to Muslims and sometimes non-Muslims. Non-Muslim expatriates are liable to Sharia rulings on marriage, divorce and child custody. Sharia courts have exclusive jurisdiction to hear family disputes, including matters involving divorce, inheritances, child custody, child abuse and guardianship of minors. Sharia courts may also hear appeals of certain criminal cases including rape, robbery, driving under the influence of alcohol and related crimes.


text: Article 1 of the Federal Penal Code states that "provisions of the Islamic Law shall apply to the crimes of doctrinal punishment, punitive punishment and blood money." The Federal Penal Code repealed only those provisions within the penal codes of individual emirates which are contradictory to the Federal Penal Code. Hence, both are enforceable simultaneously.


text: A federal law in the UAE prohibits swearing in WhatsApp and penalises swearing by a $68,061 fine and imprisonment; expats are penalised by deportation. In July 2015, an Australian expat was deported for swearing on Facebook.


text: During the month of Ramadan, it is illegal to eat, drink, or smoke in public between sunrise and sunset. Exceptions are made for pregnant women and children. The law applies to both Muslims and non-Muslims, and failure to comply results in arrest.


text: In numerous instances, the UAE government has tortured people in custody (especially expats and political dissidents).


text: UAE has escaped the Arab Spring; however, more than 100 Emirati activists were jailed and tortured because they sought reforms. Since 2011, the UAE government has increasingly carried out forced disappearances. Many foreign nationals and Emirati citizens have been arrested and abducted by the state, the UAE government denies these people are being held (to conceal their whereabouts), placing these people outside the protection of the law. According to Human Rights Watch, the reports of forced disappearance and torture in the UAE are of grave concern.


text: The Arab Organisation of Human Rights has obtained testimonies from many defendants, for its report on "forced disappearance and Torture in the UAE", who reported that they had been kidnapped, tortured and abused in detention centres. The report included 16 different methods of torture including severe beatings, threats with electrocution and denying access to medical care.


text: In 2013, 94 Emirati activists were held in secret detention centres and put on trial for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government. Human rights organisations have spoken out against the secrecy of the trial. An Emirati, whose father is among the defendants, was arrested for tweeting about the trial. In April 2013, he was sentenced to 10 months in jail.


text: Repressive measures were also used against non-Emiratis in order to justify the UAE government's claim that there is an "international plot" in which UAE citizens and foreigners were working together to destabilise the country. Foreign nationals were also subjected to a campaign of deportations. There are many documented cases of Egyptians and other foreign nationals who had spent years working in the UAE being given only a few days to leave the country.


text: Foreign nationals subjected to forced disappearance include two Libyans and two Qataris. Amnesty reported that the Qatari men had been abducted by the UAE government that withheld information about the men's fate from their families. Among the foreign nationals detained, imprisoned and expelled is Iyad El-Baghdadi, a popular blogger and Twitter personality. He was arrested by UAE authorities, detained, imprisoned and then expelled from the country. Despite his lifetime residence in the UAE, as a Palestinian citizen, El-Baghdadi had no recourse to contest this order. He could not be deported back to the Palestinian territories, therefore he was deported to Malaysia.


text: In 2012, Dubai police subjected three British citizens to beatings and electric shocks after arresting them on drugs charges. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, expressed "concern" over the case and raised it with the UAE President, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, during his 2013 state visit to Britain. The three men were pardoned and released in July 2013.


text: In April 2009, a video tape of torture was smuggled out of the UAE showed Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods, and wooden planks with protruding nails, and running him over repeatedly with a car.


text: In December 2009, Issa appeared in court and proclaimed his innocence. The trial ended on 10 January 2010, when Issa was cleared of the torture of Mohammed Shah Poor. Human Rights Watch criticised the trial and called on the government to establish an independent body to investigate allegations of abuse by UAE security personnel and other persons of authority. The US State Department expressed concern over the verdict and said all members of Emirati society "must stand equal before the law" and called for a careful review of the decision to ensure that the demands of justice are fully met in this case.


text: According to Human Rights Watch annual report 2016, Emirates authorities forcibly disappeared and detained people who criticised the government or its allies. In February 2015, Human Rights Watch documented a case in which three Emirati sisters, Asma, Mariam, and Al Yazzyah al-Suweidi, were forcibly disappeared by Emirates authorities. They released them without charge after spending three months in incommunicado detention. The three sisters were arrested after posting comments criticising the government for arresting their brother Dr. Issa al-Suweidi. In August 2015, Emirati academic Nasser bin Ghaith was arrested after posting some comments on social media in which he criticised the mass killing of Rab'a protesters in Cairo in 2013. Bin Ghaith's fate was still unknown at time of writing.


text: According to Amnesty International annual report (2016) on Human Rights in UAE, enforced disappearance has been widely practiced against citizen and foreign nationals in UAE. The international organisation said UAE government has forcibly disappeared dozens of people for months in secret and unacknowledged detention for interrogation. According to the report, Abdulrahman Bin Sobeih was subjected to enforced disappearance for three months by UAE authorities. In addition, Dr Nasser Bin Ghaith, an academic and economist, was forcibly disappeared by the authorities for more than 10 months. Bin Ghaith was subjected to torture and ill-treatment as he faced charges relating to his right to freedom of expression.


text: November 2017, Abu Dhabi security forces arrested two journalists covering the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum for Swiss public broadcaster. The journalists were held for more than 50 hours, with no ability to communicate with the outside world. According to RTS, The journalists were interrogated for up to nine hours at a time, and were blindfolded as they were shuttled between different locations. Furthermore, their camera, computers, hard drives and other material were confiscated.


text: In March 2018, an Emirati princess Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum II, daughter of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, was seized by commandos from a yacht away from the Indian coast, after she fled from UAE. A BBC documentary reported how the princess planned her escape from her residential palace. In a video recorded by Latifa prior to her escape, she claimed to have tried escaping from the UAE previously. However, she was captured at the border and jailed for three years; beaten and tortured. In December, a statement released by her family quoted that the princess was "safe" at her home. Since early March, the whereabouts of the princess were unknown. On 5 March 2020, a UK family court's 34-page ruling confirmed that Sheikha Shamsa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum and Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum had been abducted and forcibly detained by their father and the Dubai ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.


text: A number of UAEs royals have been charged for abusing and ill-treating servants in overseas countries.


text: In 2019, a 42-year-old Emirati woman, who was arrested in 2015 by the UAE authorities, grabbed media attention due to the ill-treatment she received during her imprisonment in the UAE. While raising funds for Syrian refugees, Alia Abdel Nour was arrested on the accusations of funding terrorism. She has been imprisoned for 10 years, subjected to immense torture and solitary confinement, with no access to ventilation, toilet, mattress, blanket, proper food and medicine. Despite being diagnosed with cancer – shortly after her arrest - she did not receive any medical treatment. Emirati authorities claim that Nour herself declined the medical treatment, while her family claims she was forced to sign documents that forbid her access to the treatment.


text: On 4 May 2019, Alia Abdel Nour died in the UAE prison following prolonged mistreatment and denial of medical care by the Emirati authorities. Since her arrest, her hands and feet were shackled to her hospital bed for long periods of time. The UAE authorities ignored requests by the international rights groups, European parliamentarians, and United Nations experts to release her on the grounds of her deteriorating health.


text: In January 2019, the UAE police detained 26-year-old Ali Issa Ahmad for reportedly wearing a T-shirt with Qatar's flag on it after the Qatar vs Iraq AFC Asian Cup match in Abu Dhabi. Ahmad complains that the FIFA "failed to protect" his human rights. Pictures of scars on Ahmad's body from the torture sustained during detention were released by BBC. The victim complained about racial discrimination and of being stabbed and deprived of food and water while inside the prison. Complaints have been registered against FIFA as well as directed to UAE authorities through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the UN Human Rights Council. According to UAE authorities, the police took Ahmed to a hospital to be examined for signs of abuse, which he complained of to the police — as is customary in cases of assault in the UAE. A medical report revealed that his injuries were inconsistent with the account of events he gave to police, and that his wounds were self-inflicted. UAE embassy in Britain denied the news allegations that he was arrested for wearing a Qatari shirt, stating "He was categorically not arrested for wearing a Qatar football shirt". Ahmed was charged for wasting police time and filing a false report, which is an illegal act. During the AFC Asian Cup, fans were seen wearing the Qatari football shirt and waving Qatari flags without any instances of arrest.


text: In June 2020, it was reported that the UAE had been holding captive a Turkish aid worker Mehmet Ali Ozturk, since 2018. Reportedly, Ali Ozturk has been detained on frivolous grounds and was tortured inside UAE's prison. He was arrested in Dubai, where he, alongside his wife Emine Ozturk, was participating in Dubai's food festival. "He lost 25kg after the torture they subjected him to, from denailing to strappado. They would do these things when he refused to take part in a video accusing Erdogan of some crimes," his wife quoted. In 2017, a Yemen human rights activist Huda Al-Sarari exposed a UAE secret detention facility in Yemen where thousands of Emiratis were held and tortured. Al-Sarari was forced into exile.


text: On 9 July 2020, reports claimed that the UAE authorities declined the requests of human rights organisations to provide information about an Omani man, Abdullah al-Shaamsi, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in May 2020 on a seriously unfair trial. Al-Shaamsi was arrested in 2018 at the age of 19, while attending high school in the UAE. The security forces subjected him to a sustained period of detention without communication, solitary confinement and torture, leaving him with kidney cancer and depression. Despite his health conditions, he was being held in an overcrowded prison known for unsanitary conditions and lack of access to adequate health care, during the COVID-19 crisis.


text: Since October 2020, UAE authorities on basis of religious background have forcibly disappeared at least four Pakistani men and deported at least six others. Reports of UAE authorities arbitrarily targeting Shia residents, whether Lebanese, Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani, or otherwise, often emerge at times of increased regional tensions.


text: In March 2021, the US State Department released a report on the human rights practices in the UAE. It highlighted that while the disappearance cases and unlawful killings were not reported to media throughout 2020, there were cases of torture, arbitrary detentions, abuses, threats of rape, and beatings. The department reported the conditions of Emirati prisons, which remained overcrowded, had poor sanitary conditions and provided no easy access to medical care, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The UAE prisons were described as extremely torturous, where prisoners were discriminated against and abused using various ways. The detainees were in most cases not provided with the details of their case for months, while many receive the charges written in Arabic with no translation and forced to sign such documents.


text: In July 2021, a private letter written by prominent human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor, detailing his mistreatment in detention and grossly unfair trial, was published by a London-based Arabic news site. Despite having ratified the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 2012, the UAE grossly violated the act's obligations by holding Mansoor in isolation for at least four years, amounting to physical and mental torture.


text: In September 2021, the UAE sentenced an activist from Syria, Abdul Rahman Al-Nahhas, to ten years in prison. Founder of the Insan Watch Organization, the human rights activist was charged by the Public Prosecutor of terrorism for his alleged membership in a terrorist organization as he was linked with the Switzerland-based Al-Karama Organisation for Human Rights. Al-Nahhas was also charged for insulting the prestige of the state by approaching the French embassy seeking political asylum. He was arrested at the end of 2019 and was forcibly disappeared by the UAE authorities until the commencement of his trial in January 2021. During his detention, Al-Nahhas was threatened, tortured, and was not allowed to contact his family.


text: On 1 October 2021, lawyers submitted a complaint to the French Prosecutor in Paris against Major General Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi for the unlawful detention and torture of two British men, Matthew Hedges and Ali Issa Ahmad. Al-Raisi has been a controversial candidate for the presidency of international policing body Interpol. The complaint against him was made under the principle of universal jurisdiction, allowing the French authorities to investigate and arrest foreign nationals for certain crimes even if they occurred outside France.


text: In 2021, Ahmed Naser, a UAE senior Policeman was made the chief of Interpol. He has allegedly tortured a number of people in the UAE before.


text: On 7 January 2022, the Human Rights Watch reported that Emirati authorities penalised human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor after he published a prison letter detailing his mistreatment in detention in July 2021. The UAE authorities held Mansoor largely incommunicado and denied him access to critical medical care. The UAE violated Mansoor’s rights for many years with arbitrary arrest and detention, death threats, physical assault, government surveillance, and inhumane treatment in custody.


text: A British businessman, Ryan Cornelius was being held arbitrarily by the authorities in the UAE since 2008. He was arrested from Dubai airport and was detained after some complicated business dealings with influential Emiratis. In 2010, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison after charges of fraud. The UAE authorities sentenced him for additional 20 years, two months before his release date in 2018. Cornelius contracted tuberculosis in detention. He was subjected to human rights abuses, including aggressive interrogations in absence of legal representative and prolonged solitary confinement. In June 2022, the UN officials shed light on the issue and called on the UAE to immediately release Cornelius. Cornelius’ family had been campaigning for his release. In September 2022, the family urged multiple foreign investors to divest their holdings in the Dubai Islamic Bank, which applied to extend Cornelius’ sentence. His wife, Heather Cornelius asked BlackRock “to divest yourself of your holdings in the DIB”. In her letter, she urged the fund manager to use its influence in DIB “to compel them to take all necessary steps to secure the release of my husband.” She wrote similar letters to lender JPMorgan, US investment manager Vanguard, British wealth manager St James’s Place and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund Norges Bank Investment Management.


text: The UAE authorities were keeping a woman, Amina Al Abdouli in detention since 2015, and was being held even after her sentence came to an end. In 2016, she was sentenced to 5 years in prison for charges, including “inciting hatred against the State and disturbing public order; undermining the reputation of the State institutions and publishing false information to endanger the State’s relations with its allies”. She was also faced a fine of 500,000 AED, in addition to no right of appeal. In 2021, she was sentenced for another three years for “publishing information that disturbs the public order”. During her sentence, Abdouli’s mental and physical health suffered severely. Besides, she was subjected to acts of torture, including being beaten, stripped naked, blind-folded, bound at the feet, and sleep deprived.


text: On 10 June 2020, Human Rights Watch urged UAE authorities to take care of the mental and physical health of prisoners due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak in three detention facilities.


text: The United States has sent some prisoners to the UAE; these prisoners were held inside Guantanamo Bay jail and they were tortured again. Many of these prisoners were only suspects.


text: A British football coach, Billy Hood was detained by the Dubai authorities and sentenced to ten years in prison over CBD vape oil left in his car by a visiting friend. Hood suffered rough prison conditions, where he was isolated in a tiny cell. During February 2022 visit of Prince William to the UAE for Dubai Expo 2020, Hood was “violently attacked” by four Emirati prison guards after he punched the wall of his jail cell out of “frustration”. The assault against Billy Hood was completely opposite to Prince William’s efforts to promote ties between the two nations.


text: On 28 January 2022, the Emirati authorities arrested Steve Long, a war veteran from Stockport, for telling the Etihad Airlines staff he feared there was a bomb on his plane, after a psychotic breakdown. A court in Abu Dhabi didn’t accept the medical evidence. Long was diagnosed with acute psychosis and delirium days after he was arrested. He was also ordered to pay £100,000, and was supposed to be jailed unless he paid the money. His family appealed the verdict but it was rejected, despite two medical reports saying Steve lacked capacity at the time and is not responsible for his actions. His family members believed that a drone strike in Abu Dhabi in January 2022 heightened his fears and triggered a mental collapse.


text: On 17 July 2022, the UAE authorities unjustly arrested US citizen Asim Ghafoor, the former lawyer of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and sentenced him to three years in prison. Ghafoor is also a co-founder and board member of human rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). The Abu Dhabi Money Laundering Court convicted Ghafoor of committing crimes of tax evasion and money laundering, and also ordered him to pay a fine of more than $800,000 stemming from his in absentia conviction. But the critics and human rights defenders believe that Ghafoor’s detention is politically motivated revenge for his association with Khashoggi and DAWN, which has highlighted UAE human rights abuses and war crimes. Ghafoor has stated that he had no knowledge of any legal matter against him and no reason to believe he was involved in any legal dispute in the UAE.


text: In the UAE, there is no formal commitment to free speech. It is not permitted to be in any way critical of the government, government officials, police and the royal families. Any attempt to also form a union in public and protest against any issue, will be met with severe action. Free speech restrictions apply to critics, as well as to ordinary social media users.


text: On 16 November 2007 Tecom stopped broadcast of two major Pakistani satellite news channels, uplinked from Dubai Media City, which was initially marketed by Tecom under the tagline "Freedom to Create". The Dubai government had ordered Tecom to shut down the popular independent Pakistani news channels Geo News and ARY One World on the demand of Pakistan's military regime led by General Pervez Musharraf. This was implemented by Du Samacom disabling their SDI & ASI streams. Later, policy makers in Dubai permitted these channels to air their entertainment programs, but news, current affairs and political analysis were forbidden. Although subsequently the conditions were removed, marked differences have since been observed in their coverage. This incident has had a serious impact on all organisations in the media city with Geo TV and ARY OneWorld considering relocation.


text: In 2013, the UAE arrested five men, including an American citizen for making a satirical video. The American, who had moved to Dubai for work, was sentenced to a year in prison.


text: Andrew Ross, a professor at New York University was not allowed to enter the UAE (where the university has a campus), after he had commented on the treatment of workers who built the campus there. Airline staff at the airport informed him that the UAE authorities told them that they will refuse him entry.


text: Amnesty International released a report about violating the right to freedom of expression in the United Arab Emirates. According to the report, a prominent economist, academic and human rights defender Dr Nasser bin Ghaith was sentenced to 10 years in jail by the Federal Appeal Court in Abu Dhabi. He was charged of posting false information on Twitter about UAE leaders and their policies; and the comments state that he had not been given a fair trial where he and four other Emirates prosecuted on charges of publicly insulting the countries' leaders over comments posted online. He was forcibly disappeared, held in secret detention for months and subjected to beatings and deliberate sleep deprivation.


text: Amnesty International published a report about violating the human rights in the United Arab Emirates. According to the report, a prominent human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor was arrested at 3:15 by 10 male and two female uniformed security officials. They raided the family's apartment, carried out a lengthy room-by-room search, including of the children's bedroom, and confiscated electronic devices. He was detained for the peaceful expression of conscientiously held belief.


text: Human Rights Watch issued a report regarding the violation of the rights to freedom of expression in the United Arab Emirates. On 15 March 2017, Tayseer Najjar, a Jordanian journalist, was sentenced to a three-year prison term and a fine of 500,000 UAE Dirhams by Abu Dhabi Federal Appeals Court. He was charged with insulting the state's symbols and criticising Egypt, Israel and Gulf countries through comments he made on Facebook during Israeli military operations in Gaza in 2014, before he moved to the UAE. Ten days after preventing him to travel to Jordan for his wife and children on 3 December 2015, UAE authorities summoned al-Najjar to a police station in Abu Dhabi and detained him. They also prevented him to contact with a lawyer for more than a year before bringing him to trial in January 2017.


text: Najjar was set to be released on 13 December 2018, after completing a three-year prison sentence. However, his sentence was extended for another six months as he failed to pay the substantial fine. Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders urged Anwar Gargash, the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs, for an immediate release of the journalist. Sarah Leah Whitson, Director of Human Rights Watch said, "If the UAE were truly committed to its rhetoric of tolerance, it would not have ripped Najjar away from his wife and children for years-old innocuous Facebook posts."


text: Amnesty International issued a report regarding the violation of the right to freedom of speech in the United Arab Emirates. Hussain al-Najjar has served an 11-year prison sentence; he is one of a number of prisoners convicted in 2013 following the grossly unfair mass trial of 94 government critics and reform advocates. Accordingly, on 17 March 2014, the activist Osama al-Najjar who is a 28-year-old son of Hussain, was sentenced to three years in prison after sending tweets to the Minister of Interior expressing concern about his father who had been ill-treated in jail. During the detention, he was denied access to a lawyer for over six months and held in solitary confinement at a secret detention facility for four days after his arrest.


text: During the 2017 Qatar diplomatic crisis, Hamad Saif al-Shamsi, the Attorney-General of the United Arab Emirates announced on 7 June that publishing expressions of sympathy towards Qatar through social media, or any type of written, visual or verbal form is considered illegal under UAE's Federal Penal Code and the Federal law on Combating Information Technology Crimes. Violators of this offence face between 3 and 15 years imprisonment, a fine of up to 500,000 Emirati dirhams ($136,000) or both.


text: In March 2017, UAE's prominent economist, academic and human rights defender Dr Nasser bin Ghaith was arrested and imprisoned for 10 years, for his comments on Twitter related to the treatment he received during his previous arrest. Amnesty International condemned and criticised the arrest, asking for his immediate release – which is still pending. Ghaith went on a hunger strike in October 2018; his health has been deteriorating since then. Also, he was denied access to a lawyer during his trial period and still awaits justice.


text: According to Amnesty International, Israeli company NSO Group's Pegasus spyware was used to target human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor. citizen Lab's August 2016 report, "The Million Dollar Dissident", documents the attempts made to infect Mansoor's phone with Pegasus spyware.


text: On 20 March 2020, Amnesty International and the Gulf Centre for Human Rights wrote a joint-letter and called for the immediate and unconditional release of rights activist Ahmed Mansoor. The groups also called the UAE as an "incubator of tolerance".


text: In April 2020, the authorities in the United Arab Emirates introduced criminal penalties for the spread of misinformation and rumours related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Arab Emirates. On 11 May 2020, a US-based gulf rights group, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain in its report said that "impunity in the United Arab Emirates is endemic." Their study documented tactics used by Emirati authorities to stifle dissidents, besides revealing use of torture against those recognised as imminent threat to national security. "This ‘threat' most commonly includes human rights defenders, political opposition, religious figures, and journalists," a statement from the report read. In June 2020, International Campaign for Freedom in the UAE (ICFUAE) informed that the UAE continues to detain human rights activists who demanded democratic reform in the country. The campaign group stated Fahad al-Hijri, Abdallah Ali Alhajery, Oman Alharethy and Mahmoud Alhoseny, all have completed their sentences, but continued to remain imprisoned.


text: Alaa al-Siddiq, a UAE dissident and critic of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, allegedly died in a car crash in Oxfordshire, South East England. However, campaigners and a close colleague of Ms al-Siddiq have demanded the British police to thoroughly investigate the incident, claiming that the activist's "life was at risk all the time", Khalid Ibrahim, executive-director of the GCHR. Al Siddiq was a human rights activist, who had been fighting for the release of her father Mohammad al-Siddiq, also an activist, who had been detained since 2013. According to Mr Ibrahim, threat to the life of Al Siddiq heightened since her commencing work for the Saudi human rights firm, ALQST. Other passengers in the BMW car, two adults and a child, received injuries and were taken to the hospital for treatment.


text: On 16 September 2021, in a strongly worded resolution, European Union legislators condemned alleged human rights violations in the UAE and urged the government to free several prominent human rights activists and other "peaceful dissidents" imprisoned in the country.


text: As part of its clampdown on LGBT community, the Emirati authorities modified the code of conduct for school teachers, demanding them to avoid discussions around “gender identity, homosexuality or any other behavior deemed unacceptable to UAE society”. Teachers in the English-language international schools, majorly belonging to the UK and Ireland, said the “difficult” rules “worried” them during the classes. They remained under an added pressure because of the conservative parents. The educators were also instructed by the school management to remove rainbow flags and wristbands from the premises, while children were barred from discussing the subject of same-sex marriage and homosexuality.


text: In 2012, a cybercrime decree was issued, imposing severe restrictions on freedom of speech in social networking, blogs, text messages and emails. The law outlawed criticism of senior officials and demands for political reform. The law stipulates an imprisonment and a fine of up to 1,000,000 dirhams for publishing information which is deemed to be critical towards the state.


text: In 2015, a man was detained for commenting on his employer's Facebook page after a disagreement with his employer, even though the posts were made while the man was in the United States. Police in Abu Dhabi contacted him after he came back to the UAE and asked him to meet officers at a police station, where he was later detained.


text: Secret Dubai was an independent blog in Dubai, from 2002 until 2010. It generated a significant following in the Middle East Blogosphere until the UAE's Telecoms Regulatory Authority (TRA) in the UAE blocked the website.


text: In July 2016, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain released a report accusing UAE government of enacting further laws to restrict the freedom of political and social expression. According to the organisation, Federal Law No. 12 of 2016 inhibits social and political resistance, by constraining an individual's right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression. ADHR also said counter terrorism Laws in UAE are used to legalise arbitrary arrests, detainment, prosecution and imprisonment of peaceful protestors and government critics.


text: In 2018, Internet service providers in UAE blocked all VoIP apps, but permitting "government-approved VoIP apps (C'ME and BOTIM)". In opposition, a petition on Change.org garnered over 5000 signatures, in response to which the website was blocked in UAE.


text: In December 2019, the US intelligence identified that the UAE, which banned VoIP options on several applications, developed its own messaging and video calling app ToTok and has been using it as a spying tool. The country had forbidden the calling options on applications like WhatsApp, FaceTime and Skype, prompting suspicion over the self-developed app.


text: In recent years, a large number of Shia Muslim expatriates have been deported from the UAE, Lebanese Shia families have been deported for their alleged sympathy for Hezbollah. According to some organisations, more than 4,000 Shia expats have been deported from the UAE in recent years.


text: The lack of religious freedom in China has led to Uyghur Muslims fleeing the country to take refuge in other parts of the world. However, the diplomatic relations of Beijing have resulted in the abuse and detention of Uyghur Muslims even abroad. The government of UAE was reportedly one of the three Arab nations to have detained and deported Uyghur Muslims living in asylum in Dubai, back to China. The decision received a lot of criticism due to China's poor human rights records and no extradition agreement shared between the two countries.