France: Parliamentarians denounce possibility of Emirati official taking over Interpol presidency
SANAA, Jun. 17 (YPA) – 35 French parliamentarians denounced the possibility of a senior UAE police official taking over the presidency of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), while a complaint in France accused him of torturing a human rights activist.
The deputies, who are members of Parliament and the Senate from the majority and the opposition, sent a letter to President Emmanuel Macron calling on Paris to oppose the nomination of Major General Ahmed Nasser Al Raisi for the post.
The parliamentarians said that Ahmed Nasser Al Raisi is on his way to be elected at the head of the international institution based in Lyon, eastern France, while his “heavy record should keep him from such responsibility.”
A new head of the Criminal Police Organization is scheduled to be elected in November.
In their letter, the deputies added that Al-Raisi was “directly responsible for the police forces in his country, which operate with almost complete impunity,” and accused him of playing “a central role in the arbitrary detention and violations suffered by many human rights activists.”
The Emirati official is charged with managing the security forces in the Gulf state, and he is its delegate to the Interpol Executive Committee.
Early last week, the non-governmental organization “Gulf Center for Human Rights” filed a complaint in France against Ahmed Nasser Al Raisi for “torturing” the Emirati dissident Ahmed Mansoor, who has been detained in solitary confinement for four years.
The human rights activist was arrested in 2017 and sentenced to ten years in prison the following year because, according to the Emirati authorities, he criticized the authority and tarnished his country’s image on social media.
According to the complaint, Mansour is being held in Abu Dhabi “in conditions similar to those that prevailed in the Middle Ages and amounting to torture.”
Mansour, winner of the “Martin Ennals” award, which bears the name of the former Secretary-General of Amnesty International, was previously sentenced to three years in prison in 2011 at the beginning of the “Arab Spring” for “using the Internet to insult the leaders of the UAE.”
He was released in the same year under a presidential pardon, but he was deprived of his passport and banned from traveling abroad, before he was arrested again.