Via Uruknet:

Dubai is of course not the only place in the Middle East famous for sex-trafficking; it faces stiff competition from Israel. BBC reports, in 2006 ‘the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women; it has also consistently appeared as an offender in the annual US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report.’

Marina rarely leaves her two-room home in northern Israel these days. She is in hiding - wanted by the Israeli authorities for being an illegal immigrant, and by the criminal gangs who brought her here to sell her into prostitution.

Marina - not her real name - was lured to Israel by human traffickers.

During the height of the phenomenon, from the beginning of the 1990s to the early years of 2000, an estimated 3,000 women a year were brought to Israel on the false promise of jobs and a better way of life.

“When I was in the Ukraine, I had a difficult life,” said Marina, who came to Israel in 1999 at the age of 33 after answering a newspaper advertisement offering the opportunity to study abroad.

“I was taken to an apartment in Ashkelon, and other women there told me I was now in prostitution. I became hysterical, but a guy starting hitting me and then others there raped me.

“I was then taken to a place where they sold me - just sold me!” she said, recalling how she was locked in a windowless basement for a month, drank water from a toilet and was deprived of food.

MAIN ORIGINS OF WOMEN TRAFFICKED TO ISRAEL

-Russia
-Moldova
-Ukraine
-Uzbekistan
-Belarus

That part of her ordeal only ended when she managed to escape, but the physical and mental scars remain.

Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women; it has also consistently appeared as an offender in the annual US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report.

Read the rest of the report here.

Follow-up on this previously noted article about a French boy who was raped by 3 Emirati men in Dubai:

The public prosecution in Dubai yesterday demanded the maximum penalty for two Emirati men accused of raping a French-Swiss teenager in a case that has attracted international attention.

“I demand the maximum penalty against the two accused,” one of whom is said to be HIV positive, a representative of the public prosecution said at a hearing in the booming Gulf emirate.

Under the penal code in the United Arab Emirates, the maximum penalty if the suspects are convicted could mean a death sentence.

The prosecutor accused the pair of “losing their humanity and turning into human wolves” when they committed their alleged sexual assault against the 15-year-old boy in July.

The trial of the two UAE nationals opened on October 24. A third Emirati defendant, who is a minor, is being tried separately in a juvenile court.

The two accused, aged 18 and 36, committed “a horrible crime of abduction and rape, threatening (their victim) with a knife and baton, in an isolated desert spot,” the prosecutor said. The mother of the alleged victim, Swiss journalist Veronique Robert, told the tribunal that her role as a mother was to help her teenage son “rebuild and forget.”

“Only you can decide the punishment. But my mother’s heart tells you that God gives life and only God can take it away,” she said, visibly moved.

“I was drunk,” was all the older of the two defendants, who according to legal sources is HIV positive, said in court.

The trial was adjourned until November 28 to hear the defence arguments.

Source: AFP

Glen Carey reports:

Fei Fei, a 22-year-old from China’s Guangdong province, has a souvenir of her eight months in Dubai: burns on her back and arms from cigarette butts crushed against her skin when she refused to work as a prostitute.

She eventually submitted when a criminal gang threatened to send nude photos of her to family members. That indignity, she said, would have been worse than selling her body.

“They take pictures of me naked in shower,” Fei Fei said in broken English as she pulled up her shirt to reveal the dark red circular marks. Soon afterward, she adopted the English name “Lucy,” and sold sex in Dubai bars for 500 dirhams ($130) a trick to claw back her freedom.

Fei Fei’s story symbolizes the dark side of Dubai, better known for its skyscrapers, sail-shaped hotel and man-made islands built in the shape of palm trees. The United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is the second-largest member, is on a U.S. State Department watch-list for failing to take “meaningful steps” to end trafficking of women for prostitution and other workers trapped in conditions of slavery.

There are an estimated 10,000 victims of human trafficking in Dubai, according to the department’s 2007 report. U.A.E. officials say the figure overestimates the problem and that they have begun to take action, passing the first anti-trafficking law in the Middle East.

Read the rest of the report here.

Recent article by Eva Sohlman reveals what certain women have to go through in Yemen when rape or romance is involved.

Excerpt:

There are also those in prison who have been raped and then rejected by their families, such as Noor, in Taizz in southwest Yemen. “It was very tragic. They say she was raped when she was 12 years old and got pregnant, but her father turned her into the police because of the shame [it brought upon the family]. They claimed she had prostituted herself,” says a European diplomat familiar with her case. He says Noor had been raped by some of her own male relatives and that the father had tried to save the family’s reputation by claiming she had prostituted herself. “She had no idea where to go if released. She was scared her male relatives would kill her to restore the family’s honor once she was out.”

Read the rest.

From Arab News:

JEDDAH, 15 November 2007 — The General Court in Qatif yesterday doubled the number of lashes for a rape victim as well as jail terms for her assaulters. In its verdict, the court also suspended the victim’s lawyer from defending her.

The case was referred back to the General Court by the Appeals Court judges last summer after Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, the victim’s lawyer, successfully contested against the initial verdict saying it too lenient for the rapists and unjust for the victim.

A year-and-a-half ago in the Eastern Province town of Qatif, a seven men gang-raped a 19-year-old girl 14 times. Three judges from the Qatif General Court sentenced the rape victim to 90 lashes for being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape. The sentences for the seven rapists ranged from 10 months to five years in prison.

The Appeals Court sentenced the victim to 200 lashes and six months in prison. The seven rapists had their sentences increased to between two and nine years. The verdict came in as a shock to everybody.

A source at the Qatif General Court said that the judges had informed the rape victim that the reason behind doubling her punishment was “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”

Judge Soliman Al-Muhanna from the Qatif court told the lawyer (Al-Lahem) that the judicial committee had decided to suspend him from the case. They also confiscated his license which is granted to Saudi lawyers by the Ministry of Justice.

“I explained to them that it was my job to do everything legal in order to serve my client. But they did not listen,” he said.

To Al-Lahem’s surprise he received a call from the Judicial Investigation Department of the Ministry of Justice to inform him of a disciplinary session he should attend on 25th of the Hijra month.

“Actually this is the second time they have contacted me. They claim that I advertise my services and that that is against Saudi law,” he said.

The Deccan Herald reports:

An illegal immigrant of Indian descent is being tried in court here for exploiting a ”penniless housemaid” after he was caught attempting to sell her.

The Public Prosecution charged the 30-year-old suspect with breaching federal law on human trafficking for exploiting an Indonesian housemaid, Gulf News reported.

Apparently, the woman, who was in need of money, was forced into flesh trade by the accused. He has also been charged with illegally staying in the country.

The accused confessed to the charges and said he did not force the woman into prostitution and instead ‘’she was willing to do sex work”.

The suspect has pleaded not guilty before the Dubai Court of First Instance.An advocate will be assigned to defend the suspect.

Link to original article.

The International Herald Tribune reports this very disturbing story of three Emirati men who raped a French teenager in Dubai:

DUBAI: Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a dream summer in this tourist paradise on the Gulf. It was Bastille Day, and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.

Just after sunset, Alex was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old native-born student at the American school, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off.

There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts, aged 35 and 18. They drove Alex past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club and told him they would kill his family members if he ever reported them.

Then, Alex says, they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex on the side of the road across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.

Alex and his family were about to learn that despite Dubai’s status as the Arab world’s paragon of modernity and wealth, its legal system remains a perilous gantlet when it comes to homosexuality and legal protection of foreigners.

The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he says; they have left open the possibility of charging Alex with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested HIV positive while in prison four years earlier.

“They tried to smother this story,” Alex said by phone from Switzerland, where he fled a month into his 10th grade, fearing a jail term in Dubai if charged with homosexual activity. “Dubai, they say we build the highest towers, they have the best hotels. But all the news, they hide it. They don’t want the world to know that Dubai still lives in the Middle Ages.”

United Arab Emirates law does not recognize rape of males, only a crime called “forced homosexuality.” The two adult men charged with molesting Alex appeared in court Wednesday, and will face trial before a three-judge panel on Nov. 7. The third, a minor, will be tried in juvenile court. Men convicted of sexually assaulting other men usually serve sentences ranging from a few months to two years, legal experts here say.

Read the rest of the story here.

So much for the “land of opportunities.”