Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I do not think anybody is going to be sorry if people involved in violent criminality are extradited from the United Arab Emirates. This arrangement facilitates that extradition and the bringing to justice of people involved in violent criminality. However, to put it very mildly, I have grave concerns about the UAE's human rights credentials. I see in the Minister's speech, which I have just looked through, that there is a lot of conditionality around all of this and that she is cognisant of the human rights aspect of it, as it were. It is important to say this is a regime that has a brutal disregard for human rights. It has dozens of prisoners of conscience. This is a regime in which people can get long stretches in prison, up to 15 years, for damaging the reputation or prestige of the president. Every single one of us would be in prison for the comments that are made on a regular basis in this Dáil in robust political debate. People would get a 15-year prison sentence in the United Arab Emirates for saying things that we, and members of the public, say every day about what we see as the policy failures of politicians of all stripes.

That is the sort of regime we are dealing with, The UAE is closely associated with Saudi Arabia, which has a similarly brutal sort of authoritarian character and has been up to its neck in an horrific, near genocidal war against the people of Yemen for a long period. Its weapons have slaughtered tens of thousands of people in Yemen. Much to the anger and fury of ordinary people in the Middle East, in particular the Palestinian people who are suffering under the horror of a genocidal assault by Israel but also decades of apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing, the UAE is also one of the few regimes that gives free passage to the people and political representatives of Israel to go to that country. Were it not for recent events and the outrage being expressed across the region at what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, the UAE was planning to have an agreement with Israel that was mediated, interestingly enough, by Donald Trump to normalise relations between it and Israel. That is despite the horror of what Israel is doing and despite the fact that it does not represent the vast majority of people in the Middle East or very likely in the UAE itself. It has a terrible record on the treatment of migrant workers, who make up about 80% of the population of the country.

This is a brutal, nasty regime that is more than willing to do business with the regime in Israel that is committing genocidal atrocities and war crimes against the people of Palestine. It is important to put these things on the record because this is not some sort of normal regime. It is part of an architecture of oppression. Effectively, the regime was established by the colonial powers as part of a project to control and dominate the Middle East and set up dictatorial regimes to prevent the self-determination of the people of the Middle East and their ability to control their own destinies. That is actually what this regime is part of. I just hope that this is not a step towards legitimising a very brutal regime that is a block to the self-determination of the people of the Middle East and their ability to have freedom, justice and to control their own destinies, and which has very scant regard for human rights.

See this speech in context