A UK citizen has been sentenced to three months in jail in Dubai after “insulting” airport staff who were slow to bring his mother a wheelchair.
The unnamed man was originally issued a Dh 10,000 (£2,150) fine, but his appeal against this failed and his punishment was extended to a jail term on 6 November.
An airport employee told the court that the man swore at her after she had explained the airport’s wheelchair policy to him, telling him that “a wheelchair would be made available before boarding the bus”.
“When I tried to explain it to him, he insulted me using very bad language. I told the traveller that using such offensive language is not allowed at Dubai airport but he responded that he didn’t care.”
The employee then called the police, and a case was filed against the man in Dubai’s Criminal Court. Following an appeal, which he lost, the fine was escalated into a jail sentence, followed by immediate deportation.
It makes sense that a penalty is set proportional to the harm caused, so the 3 months sentence might make sense if the victim was genuinelly psychologically affected by it in a way that lasted a significant period, but for merelly feeling insulted 3 months seems the kind of “Justice not at all trying to be Just” you get when authoritarian moralism is encoded in Law, not at all what law-making should strive for in a country aiming for Rule Of Law were sentencing is guided by harm caused rather than the iron-fist enforcing of moral behaviours.
Of course, this being the UAE, I’m not at all surprised that the Law is not at all about doing what is Just, since unlike in Democracies that country doesn’t even attempt to have real Rule Of Law.