Dubai: Tax free trading vs an insane legal "system"

Not sure how many people, dazzled by appearances and massive marketing, are really aware of what's what down there:

United Arab Emirates injustice system:

Attempt murder - three months
Beat up your wife - six months
Molest a child - one year
Steal from charity - one year
Drink, drive, kill - one year
Slash four women - two years
Torture your maid - three years
Rape a woman - three years

Smoke cannabis outside the UAE - four years

Pot smoking consequences outside of the UAE:

Teenager who smoked hashish prior to arrival in country will serve four years
Abu Dhabi: A teenager who smoked a cigarette containing hashish while he was in Egypt will serve four years in jail followed by deportation, the Federal Supreme Court has confirmed.

Or check this out...

British woman has returned from Dubai after spending eight weeks in jail for having codeine in her body.
Tracy Wilkinson, 43, from Balcombe, West Sussex, was cleared of wrongdoing on Sunday when it was proved the painkiller was prescribed in the UK.

The drug, banned in the United Arab Emirates, was found in her urine when she was held over a passport error.

Arriving at Heathrow she said there were times she thought she would never be freed and feared she could even die.
"At one point they handcuffed me in this tiny cell for about six hours, I was handcuffed so I was kind of dangling and could not reach the floor.

"I thought I'm going to die here. I couldn't breathe."

The mother-of-two, a sports osteopath, had faced a four-year jail sentence if found guilty.

Unbelievable:


International Herald Tribune

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."

A hundred camels couldn't drag me down into that barbaric sauna of a dictatorship.

Just imagine the potentially pretty dire consequences of being involved in a car accident with a member of the dictatorial family that's rather well known for having members favouring a fast, gumball-3000 type of driving style, lol.

but isn't it good for shopping?



UTB

No, but another Alex I remember said this....


"Democracy is when 2 wolves and a sheep decide what's for lunch"

LOL Blades !

Must admit, that is true though ;-)

Thing is, if a shopping trip seems indicated, to then spend value time in detox before arriving, and, while there, to not drive cars, kiss girls or get raped, and then one just might, with a bit of extra luck, bypass a paid vacation in one the Sheiks hospitable detention facilities.

Nice one, Buddhist.

somehow, I think the £200 a year I spend in UK shops is safe

UTB (AKA Worzel Gummage)

That's definitely where my next shopping trip is going to be taking me :-)

You guys definitely have some of the most polite and helpful police people around.

I remember one car trip to the UK and London some years ago where we got quite drunk, and actually embarrassingly enough couldn't remember where we'd parked the car the next day, lol. Anyway, the police men we approached actually spent the better part of a morning driving us around until we finally managed to find our car.

Super.

This nice person spent 7 months looking for his car:

Man finds his car seven months after forgetting where he parked it

Hilarious. But that's what comes from insisting on doing it yourself ;-)

aye, if nothing else our police are extremely skilled in the art of dealing with drunkards. I'm not sure what that says about us though

UTB

Err...