HRW urges UAE to stop abuse of prisoners in southern Yemen
Human Rights Watch has demanded that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) probe and stop mistreatment of prisoners in informal jails it oversee in Yemen.
Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW’S Middle East director, said on Thursday that “the UAE and their Yemeni proxies should stop denying responsibility for mistreatment and investigate and act on the complaints."
The remarks come as mistreatment of prisoners by UAE-backed forces in southern Yemen has forced the detainees to go on hunger strike.
In a Thursday report, the New York-based rights group also cited prisoners' family members as saying the hunger strike began on October 21 at the Bir Ahmed military camp in Aden.
In recent months, militants backed by the UAE have reportedly kidnapped and tortured hundreds of people in southern Yemen.
On June 9, the American news and analysis website The Daily Beast published an investigation bankrolled by the NGO Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which recounted the findings.
The probe said the militants, fighting under the banner of the Elite Forces, had spirited the men away from their homes and brought them to a secret prison compound in southern Yemen, where they were tortured.
Earlier in the year, the United Nations had likewise reported an increase in forced disappearances in southern Yemen.
The UAE has served as an ally of Saudi Arabia in the latter’s military campaign in Yemen, which started in March 2015, to restore the impoverished country’s former Riyadh-allied government. The Elite Forces have been fighting in Yemen since 2015 to assist the Saudi-led campaign.
More than 14,000 people have been killed since the onset of the military campaign and much of the country’s infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been ravaged.
Saudi war has also left some 17 million Yemenis hungry, nearly seven million facing famine, and about 16 million almost without access to water or sanitation.
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