ADVENTURES IN DUBAI: YOUR FAVOURITE NUMBER ONE BLOG BRITISH DESIGNER LIVING IN DUBAI TELLS (NEARLY) ALL
Monday, November 20, 2006
Middle Finger Crime
The getting-worse-by-the-day Emirates Toady reports on the case of a British gentleman in court for allegedly flashing his middle finger at a local. I couldn't believe this story. Apparently this is the fifth 'middle-finger crime' incident to hit the courts in Dubai this year. People have been jailed and one was even deported for doing something that most people would not give a second thought to.
The Toady explains, for the benefit of us decency-challenged readers: 'Showingthe middle finger - a Western gesture of insult and rejection - is considered tantamount to slander in the UAE.' Actually I did not know that. How can it be slander? Slander is a groundless or downright wrong verbal accusation made against someone. If what you said can be proved to be true, then no offence has been committed. In the case of middle-finger-waving, what are they presuming the finger-waver is saying? Something bad, no doubt. But what if it was justified by the actions of the other person? Sadly, the Emirates Toady report is lacking in detail: it states that the accused was asked whether he had any witnesses to support his claim that he was not waving his finger, but merely gesturing at his head to indicate to the other party that thinking about what he was doing would be a good idea. There is no mention of whether the 18-year-old local in his car with tinted windows had any witnesses.
Grrr...what a waste of time and money.
Also in today's Toady, Managing Editor Eudore R Chand makes a bid to take over where KT's Galadari left off. He's written a leader in which he claims that road tolls will make all our lives better. He seriously seems to think that the dhs 4 toll on part of Sheikh Zayed Road and the Garhoud Bridge will actually make a big difference to driving on these roads. Maybe it will, but it will be at the expense of total and utter gridlock on alternative routes like Al Wasl and Beach Roads, Emirates Road and the Maktoum Bridge and Shindagah Tunnel. For those who cannot or will not pay the toll, life will become even more of a nightmare than it already is.
Oops, that wasn't very positive was it? I hope the RTA will think again about this plan: Dubai needs serious alternative public transport infrastructure up and running before using tolls to drive people off the roads.
My thanks to Grapeshisha for posting an English translation of the UAE's new cyber crimes law. I hope and pray that it is a bad translation, because it talks about issues that are very far removed from 'cyber crime'. Anyhoo, I quite like this clause...
Article No.5 of the law reads anyone convicted of hampering, blocking or preventing the reach of service or logging onto computer programmes, or information sources with any possible means whether via the use of internet or any information technology mean, shall be punished with a jail term, or a fine, or both.
I couldn't let this pass without throwing in my twopennyworth. US hip hop producer Dallas Austin (sorry I'd never heard of him before - apparently he is personally responsible for producing an awful lot of music that I simply cannot stand) has spent the last three weeks in a small room with a thick, locked steel door at Rashidiya Police Station. The reason? He brought a bit over a gramme of cocaine into the UAE 'by accident'. He admits he knew it was illegal to do this.
A few days ago there was a trial (very speedy by Dubai standards); he was sentenced to four years in jail, and a few hours later he was pardoned by a higher authority.
Today's Gulf News carries a story about an Omani who was picked up on arrival at Abu Dhabi from Bangkok. 'Traces of hashish' were found in his wallet. He was acquitted by the Abu Dhabi Criminal Court, but the Public Prosecution appealed and the Court of Appeal sentenced him to four years followed by deportation. A pardon is not expected.
The UAE, of course, has the sovereign right to do whatever it likes, and I am but a humble guest here who nobody listens to. But I'll say this anyway.
The UAE is now sending out very mixed signals about its attitude to narcotics. We will likely see more people bringing in illegal substances because they think they can get away with it (as long as their wasta/bling factor is high enough). But many visitors to this country are ending up in jail because they are not experts in UAE law.
One example: did you know that the UAE system can prosecute you for offences committed outside the country? You might expect that to be up to the legal systems of the country where the offence took place. But there are numerous cases of people who have been jailed because residue of banned drugs was found on their person, their clothes or their possessions. The Omani guy mentioned above is a case in point. He had no actual useable hashish on him. He may have had some in Thailand, or it may have been planted on him by some Kuwaitis, as he claims. And he gets four years. Residue of some drugs can be detected in your bloodstream for months after the initial consumption. I might add that hashish is a drug that is generally considered less harmful than tobacco.
Another example: who knew, before the Tracy Wilkinson case last year, that possession of readily available medicines containing things like codeine or tamazepam without a prescription, can get you locked up? I certainly didn't, and I've lived here twelve years! It should be noted by the cops and the courts that people generally take their prescription to the pharmacist, who keeps it in exchange for the medicine and the money. Expecting visitors to make a copy of their prescription, translate it into Arabic and keep it with them when in the UAE is just ridiculous.
And then there's this...
Increasingly we are seeing more and more examples of wildly inconsistent sentencing, especially for rape and drug cases. This needs to be looked at by the powers that be. If one guy gets four years for actual possession of cocaine but is let off, and another guy gets four years for possession of traces of hashish and will not be let off, what are we supposed to think?
I'll give you my view of Wasta in a future post if I don't get banned/blocked/deported for this one.
A geezer in Afghanistan is currently on trial, accused of the heinous crime of 'denying Islam'. If found guilty, which I expect he will be because he does not seem to be denying that he converted to Christianity 14 years ago, he could be sentenced to death. What is this nonsense?
OK, it's Afghanistan, and anything can happen there. Although it absolutely should not be happening under the Grand Puppet President Karzai. But it is happening, and the guy will get the death penalty, and the rest of the world will be slack-jawed and disbelieving, exactly the same as when the Taliban blew up the Buddha statue.
Now look. I know Afghanistan has its own legal system. And it's pretty much pure Shari'a. So, is this right? Does Shari'a law say 'kill anyone who quits Islam' or does it not? Islam is supposed to be the religion of tolerance. How does Islam benefit by having members who want to leave but are afraid to because they fear they could be killed? How does Islam's stature in the world increase by murdering 'apostates'?
On a slightly separate note, I read some stuff a few years ago about 'Untouchables' in India discovering that they could become 'real people' by the simple expedient of converting to Christianity.
So the good news today is that Tracy Lewis, the codeine lady, has been acquitted. The bad news is that she may have to hang around for a fortnight while the Public Prosecution decide whether they want to appeal the verdict. Given the sensitivity of this case, they may make their decision very quickly, in which case she will be free to go.
What a shambles. I am disgusted and totally ashamed by this case. The lady has had to spend eight weeks in jail for nothing! I know that the UK legal system is capable of similar cock-ups and miscarriages of justice, but not generally over an issue of such doubtful criminality. By which I mean that in this case what she did is nothing like a crime in most of the rest of world, it is only made a crime because for some obscure reason codiene is a controlled drug in this country.
Another interesting, possibly related article in today's Gulf News . Four doctors have been deported for alledgedly selling prescriptions for (unspecified) narcotic drugs to anyone who wanted them.
A psychiatrist commented to Gulf News: "As a medical professional I am outraged at such conduct but some of these arrests are set up by the police. Drug enforcement agencies send a patient who falsely claims he is sick. We, as doctors, are sometimes duped by the informants and write them prescriptions. How are we supposed to know they are making up these symptoms?"
How often do you see reports on criminal activity in this parish that include the phrase 'the suspect was arrested in a sting operation'? It seems to me that CID spend more time turning innocent people into 'criminals' than they do in chasing the actual wicked perps that are running loose out there. It ticks me off, so it do.
Today's papers are saying that the unfortunate lady in this case has been released on 'bail'. Previous reports of her having been sentenced to four years are, apparently, somewhat inaccurate.
This whole story has acquired something of a surreal quality - almost every aspect of it is surrounded in ambiguity and confusion, and today it was revealed that even her name has been erroneously reported.
It's unusual for 'bail' to be granted in drug-related cases. I put the word in inverted commas because both the name and the nature of this concept are a bit different than what we are familiar with in the West. Suspects can be released from custody if another person surrenders their passport to the Court. This passport must contain a valid residence visa. In the event that the suspect absconds then the person whose passport has been surrendered becomes in effect a stand-in for the suspect and can be arrested and punished as if he was the original perp. I've never heard of anyone posting a financial bond.
So I wonder who has put their passport in to get this lady out?
She complains that there is no presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and indeed this is the case. The one thing that drives me nuts about this country (apart from the other 14,723 things) is just how easy it is to get thrown in jail, and how very difficult it seems to be to get your message across to the Judge. All Court proceedings take place in Arabic. This is fair enough, it is the official language of the country. Defendants are not normally allowed to speak in the court. All communication takes place through your advocate. Your advocate may or may not have a good grasp of English - the law is one profession here where being able to spikka da Inglese does not matter. It's a heavily paper-based exercise. I don't think that witnesses are ever asked to appear in court, but they can submit a written you-know-what. And there is no jury.
I know half-a-dozen people who have spent time in jail here either for fairly trivial offences ('insulting a local' is a good catch-all) or just being held while an investigation is being conducted. In all three of the latter situations the accused were acquitted.
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I guess this is the price we pay for living in a very safe society, but paradoxically I feel more at risk of imprisonment by the legal establishment than I do of being mugged or robbed.
More on the codeine case in today's Gulf News. Her lawyer is insisting that she has not been sentenced, and GN insists that their source at the courts says she has. Khaleej Times is not covering the story directly, but has paraphrased (and named!) Gulf News in its story. And secretdubai is pretty upset by it.
The British Foreign Office is advising potential travellers to the UAE to ensure that they do not bring medicines containing codeine into the UAE. Codeine is banned here, and possession of it carries a maximum four year jail sentence. But here's the thing, 'possession' is deemed to occur even if you have consumed the stuff some time previously (and someplace else on the planet) and are still carrying traces of it in your wee or your blood. And here's the other thing, in the UK and most of the rest of the world, products containing codeine are available by prescription and in some cases directly over the counter from a pharmacist.
Yesterday a British visitor to Dubai was sentenced to four years in jail because she was found to have taken codeine. This is somewhat shocking, especially as she had been prescribed the med by a doctor in the UK, did not physically bring any tablets into the country, and probably did not have the slightest idea that it would be a problem here.
Come to that, I've lived here for 11 years, and was only vaguely aware that some commonplace Western meds are banned in the UAE. But I had absolutely no idea that 'possession' could carry a four year jail sentence. I can't say exactly what I think about this (I'm pretty sure there's a BlogCop Division at CID), but I think I can say that this sentence does nobody any good, and if it gets major publicity in the UK it will certainly damage the Dubai tourist trade.
Nobody wants to visit a country where you can get thrown in jail so easily for something that you did completely legally in your own country.
OK, this post isn't about Dubai - it's about proposed changes in UK legislation regarding the rights of burglars and their victims. I was prompted to write it after reading 'Hot Burglaries' from the blog of a UK copper.
The problem is that UK law seems to be heavily biased towards those doing the burgling. The victim has the right to use 'reasonable force' to protect himself and his property, but not to shoot the thieving toe-rag in the back as Tony Martin did.
Under the new law, Tony Martin would still go to jail. I'm not advocating that people should keep guns in their homes, in fact I think the traditional Brit approach of tightly controlling gun use and ownership is the right one. But I do think that if some scumbag has broken into your home, intent on nicking your stuff, then anything (absolutely anything) that happens to them while on that mission is entirely their own responsibility.
The Policeman's Blog mentions that 'hot' burglaries (where the victim is in residence at the time) account for 13% of all burglaries in the US against 50% in the UK. And the reason for the much lower rate in the US is that the likelihood of the victim being armed is much higher, coupled with the fact that US courts are never going to sympathise with anyone getting hurt or even killed while trying to steal the property of others.
I remember many years ago in Liverpool, we were just married, we'd just got our first house and were struggling to turn it into a home. One day, BetterArf was in the upstairs back bedroom when she spotted a youth climbing over the backyard wall (it was a six-foot-high wall, so it wasn't like he just fell over it). He spotted her, and beat a hasty retreat. She called the cops, and they sent a 'Crime Prevention Officer', who told us to stick a load of broken glass on the top of the wall. And then he said 'but I never told you that.' I asked him why, and he said because an aspiring buglar might injure themselves on it, and then he might sue me.
