Ahmed Mansoor (Emirati human-rights defender; Martin Ennals laureate) — per Human Rights Watch / GCHR (27 Jan 2021): the UAE jailed its most prominent rights activist for 10 years for peaceful advocacy — his tweets about injustices, online human-rights conferences and contacts with HRW/GCHR were used as criminal evidence; UAE laws "criminalize the peaceful criticism of senior officials... and... imprison anyone who argues for political reform."

Mansoor’s tweets about injustices, participation in international human rights conferences online, and his email exchanges and WhatsApp conversations with international human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, were all included as evidence of criminal activity to support his spurious charges.

both of which criminalize the peaceful criticism of senior officials, the judiciary, and public policies, and provide a legal basis to prosecute and imprison anyone who argues for political reform.

[Source is English (Human Rights Watch, with the Gulf Centre for Human Rights); confirmed verbatim against the fetched page. PROVENANCE NOTE: Mansoor has been held incommunicado in solitary confinement since 2017, so his own recent verbatim words are unavailable; this documents his case and declared advocacy as recorded by HRW/GCHR — the same kind of rights-org documentation used for Saudi Arabia's al-Awda and Bahrain's Ali Salman.] BEHAVIORAL civil-liberties / freedom-of-expression evidence on the UAE, together with the DECLARED stance of Ahmed Mansoor — the United Arab Emirates' most prominent human-rights defender (a blogger and engineer who ran a reform-and-rights blog, sat on the advisory boards of HRW and the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, and won the 2015 Martin Ennals Award; he was the target of the 2016 "million-dollar dissident" Pegasus spyware operation). Per HRW/GCHR (27 January 2021): the UAE arrested Mansoor in March 2017 and sentenced him to 10 years in prison (plus a ~$270,000 fine), holding him in indefinite solitary confinement, on charges "entirely related to his human rights activities" — his tweets about injustices, online participation in human-rights conferences, and contacts with HRW/GCHR were treated as criminal evidence. HRW notes the UAE penal code and 2012 cybercrimes law "criminalize the peaceful criticism of senior officials, the judiciary, and public policies, and provide a legal basis to prosecute and imprison anyone who argues for political reform." This documents UAE INTERNAL dissent and its suppression — the sharp counterpoint to the Emirates' branding as a "tolerant", modern state and to the establishment foreign-policy voice of Anwar Gargash documented elsewhere (and akin to the exile activist Iyad El-Baghdadi). [Axes: civil-liberties / freedom-of-expression (behavioral — UAE state repression of peaceful advocacy), democracy (political-reform advocacy criminalized), regime-stance (UAE intolerance of internal dissent). Declared stance: human rights, free expression, peaceful political reform.]