Human rights in the United Arab Emirates is recorded in this encyclopedia from the source named below.
Overview
Human rights in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are severely restricted. The UAE does not have democratically elected institutions and citizens do not have the right to change their government or form political parties. Activists and academics who criticize the government are detained and imprisoned, and their families are often harassed by the state security apparatus. There are reports of forced disappearances of foreign nationals and Emirati citizens, who have been abducted, illegally detained and tortured in undisclosed locations, and denied the right to a speedy trial or access to counsel during investigations by the UAE government. The non-governmental organisation (NGO) Human Rights Watch, states that Emirati laws maintain capital punishment and discriminate against women, migrants and LGBTQ individuals. The government restricts freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the local media are censored to prevent criticism of the government, government officials or royal families. As a result, the UAE routinely ranks near the bottom of many international indexes for human rights and press freedom. Despite being elected to the UN Council, the UAE is not a signatory of many 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 United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. In November 2020, the UAE overhauled its legal system and enacted a number of reforms, including lowering restrictions on alcohol consumption, permitting cohabitation, imposing harsher sentences for honor killings, and removing corporal punishment as a legal form of punishment in its penal code.
Source and reuse
The descriptive text above is drawn from the English-language encyclopedia article Human rights in the United Arab Emirates, reused under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence and attributed in the sources block on this page. Figures in the infobox come from Wikidata and carry that project's own provenance; they should be checked against the cited source before being relied on.
Editorial note
This record is a sourced summary, not original research. Where the underlying material is silent on a point, this article is silent too. Last reviewed 2026-09-23.