THE SINISTER TRUTH THAT LIES BENEATH DUBAI'S GLITTERING SURFACE

Low taxation, a luxury lifestyle — to some, the Gulf state looks like a paradise. But behind the façade is a brutally repressive regime where human rights are non-existent

- WORDS BY TANYA GOLD ILLUSTRATION BY HIT & RUN

Dubai is home to a quarter of a million British people: dismayed by our high taxation, poor public services and rain, their numbers swell each year. One of the seven emirates of the UAE, Dubai is a polyglot city, a Babel. Ninety per cent of its residents are from elsewhere. The Gulf expert Christopher Davidson calls Dubai the "ultimate liberal economic city state" with "some of the best physical infrastructure in the region". He adds: "For many years, it's provided ongoing political stability, which in the Arab world, and especially the Gulf region, has been in great scarcity." It has low taxation and cheap labour: that is its lure.

When I went to Dubai I found it disorientating, above all things — capitalism meets tyranny, and I can't fathom anything worse. They have astounding things — the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building; the Palm Jumeirah, an artificial archipelago created in the shape of a palm tree — and this seems to blind credulous westerners to its reality. Dubai is a dictatorship under Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and he preserves his absolute power as dictators always do: with the repression of all potential threats.

A Human Rights Watch spokeswoman says Dubai has "a zero-tolerance policy towards dissent and no respect for basic freedoms". There are "grave crimes committed against migrant workers, as well as an extremely abusive foreign policy". The UAE finances brutal militia in Yemen and the Sudan.

After the abortive Arab Spring and its plea for greater representation, the sheikh imprisoned dissidents, many of them lawyers. Ahmed Mansoor "is arguably the UAE's most well-known human rights defender," she says, going on to explain: "Since March 2017 he's been imprisoned in an isolation cell with barely more than a mat to sleep on. Ahmed is a close friend to many of my colleagues at HRW: he's a current member of our advisory committee."