Freedom of Expression
For more details on this topic, see Emirates Discussion Forum.As is the case with religious freedom, Dubai does, in comparison to other nations in the region, extend a degree of toleration for freedom of expression. Sheikh Mohammed, Dubai’s Crown Prince, has made public speeches asserting that Dubai will remain committed to press freedom, international journalists are generally left alone and a new law was enacted that will protect journalists from imprisonment for doing their job. The Constitution of the United Arab Emirates guarantee freedom of opinion, press and expression within the limits of the law.
However, human rights groups have expressed concerns about freedom of expression in Dubai, which is often limited by enacted laws or Ministerial edicts in the name of protecting traditional Islamic morality or the image and reputation of Dubai and its leaders.
In 2007, the Dubai government shut down two Pakistani based television channels, Geo News and Ary One. Their entertainment, but not news and political programming, were eventually permitted to broadcast in Dubai.
The Dubai Ministry of Culture and Media banned the exhibition of a play, "Kholkhal", just hours before it was scheduled to be performed at the 8th annual Gulf Theater Festival.
While journalists can no longer be jailed for doing their job, other legal actions can be taken against them. Several members of the Dubai press remain on a government list as being banned from being published within the Emirate. There is also reportedly a degree of self-censorship that occurs, for fear of governmental sanctions, of certain topics that are critical of government policy, the royal family, or may offend traditional Islamic morality.
Read more about this topic: Human Rights In Dubai
Famous quotes containing the words freedom of expression, freedom of, freedom and/or expression:
“In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Parents do not give up their children to strangers lightly. They wait in uncertain anticipation for an expression of awareness and interest in their children that is as genuine as their own. They are subject to ambivalent feelings of trust and competitiveness toward a teacher their child loves and to feelings of resentment and anger when their child suffers at her hands. They place high hopes in their children and struggle with themselves to cope with their children’s failures.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)