Take Action for Human Rights: Ramadan 2021

Free prisoner of conscience Mohammed al-Roken

Dr. Mohammed Al-Roken, a prisoner of conscience, is a prominent academic, a former professor of constitutional law, and human rights lawyer. State Security officials arrested him on July 17, 2012. On July 2, 2013, the highest court of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) sentenced him to a 10-year prison sentence following an unfair, mass trial of 94 activists. It became widely known as the “UAE 94” trial.

For around two decades before his imprisonment, human rights groups, including Amnesty International, frequently called upon Mohammed Al-Roken, who is from Dubai, for analysis and expertise they used to inform their work on the UAE and other Gulf countries. Mohammed Al-Roken is former president of the UAE’s Jurists Association and holds a PhD in Constitutional Law from the UK’s University of Warwick. He had been harassed for a number of years because of his human rights work. He is a member of the International Bar Association and has written several books on human rights, counter-terrorism laws and freedom of expression. He also represented the UAE government in several legal conferences.

He has spent over eight years of his 10 years sentence in a UAE jail. In the UAE often activists are kept in jail even after serving their prison term.