By Mahmoud Habboush
REUTERS
ABU DHABI: Five activists from the United Arab Emirates pleaded not guilty Monday to charges of incitement and insulting the Gulf country’s leadership, their lawyer said, in a trial rights groups argued is aimed at silencing political dissent.

Police arrested the activists and intellectuals last April, and the attorney general told state news agency WAM the men were suspected of inciting “acts that threaten state security and public order,” and “insulting the president, vice president and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.”
The UAE has been spared political unrest even as mass protests hit its borders in neighboring Oman and Yemen earlier this year.
The trial was adjourned for a second hearing next Monday.

“The UAE government is using defamation as a pretext to prosecute activists for peacefully expressing their beliefs about the way their country should be run,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa deputy director, in a joint statement with three other groups, including Human Rights Watch.
Among the defendants is Ahmad Mansoor, an outspoken rights activist who joined several dissidents this year to start an online petition demanding the country’s quasi-parliamentary body, the Federal National Council, receive greater powers.

Another defendant, Nasser bin Ghaith, a lecturer at the Abu Dhabi branch of France’s Sorbonne University, published an article criticizing what he called Gulf states’ attempt to avoid political reform by buying off their populaces.

Generous government spending programs in the UAE and a high per capita income of $47,000 has staved off the kind of mass pro-democracy protests that have swept the region.
But the activists’ case shows its sensitivity to political dissent. Outside the UAE’s Federal Supreme Court, hundreds gathered in support and a few in protest at the trial.