By Radha Stirling, Interpol and Extradition Expert, Founder of Detained in Dubai, IPEX Reform and Due Process International
The UAE is celebrating a dramatic expansion in international judicial cooperation, announcing faster extraditions, property seizures and closer relationships with foreign police and prosecutors.
But there is another side to this development that should concern every foreign national living in, investing in or travelling through the Emirates.
According to figures announced by UAE Minister of Justice Abdullah Sultan bin Awad Al Nuaimi at the United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in Abu Dhabi, incoming extradition requests to the UAE increased by 235 per cent between 2021 and 2025, while mutual legal assistance requests rose by 244 per cent. The UAE now has more than 140 bilateral judicial cooperation agreements with 53 countries.
The government highlighted the arrest and subsequent extradition of Daniel Kinahan to Ireland as evidence of the efficiency of its new approach. Kinahan was arrested within days of an Irish extradition request and, following proceedings through the UAE courts, was extradited to Ireland on 9 August 2026.
The UAE also revealed that cooperation with French authorities resulted in 82 properties being seized in November 2025 in connection with a French investigation.
These cases are being presented as evidence that the UAE is no longer a safe haven for international criminals.
That objective is perfectly legitimate but danger arises when speed, diplomatic cooperation and law enforcement relationships take precedence over independent scrutiny of the foreign request itself.
Extradition requests are not proof of guilt
There is a fundamental distinction between international cooperation and automatic compliance.
A foreign government requesting somebody's arrest does not establish that the person is guilty. An INTERPOL Red Notice does not establish guilt either.
INTERPOL itself makes clear that a Red Notice is not an international arrest warrant. It is a request to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition or similar proceedings. INTERPOL further states that individuals sought for prosecution must be considered innocent until proven guilty.
This distinction is enormously important.
In my work over almost two decades, I have repeatedly encountered cases where international criminal mechanisms have been deployed in circumstances involving political disputes, commercial conflicts, family disagreements, alleged debts, corporate fallouts and attempts to exert financial pressure.
Freedom House reported again in 2026 that governments continued using INTERPOL mechanisms as instruments of transnational repression during 2025. It recorded incidents involving governments manipulating the system to pursue opponents abroad and warned that INTERPOL's oversight mechanisms remain significantly stretched.
The problem therefore is not international cooperation itself. It is cooperation without sufficient scepticism.
What happens when the requesting country is Uzbekistan, China or Pakistan?
The safeguards become even more important when extradition is requested by a country with a documented record of arbitrary detention, torture, political interference or serious deficiencies in judicial independence.
Uzbekistan provides an obvious example.
US State Department reporting has documented credible reports concerning torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, problems with judicial independence, political prisoners and transnational repression in Uzbekistan.
Despite these concerns, cooperation between Uzbekistan and the UAE has intensified.
Uzbekistan's own government announced that twelve wanted individuals had been extradited from the UAE following cooperation between the countries' INTERPOL National Central Bureaus. Uzbek officials described discussions in which the two sides exchanged lists of wanted individuals and suspects and negotiated further extraditions.
This is precisely where judicial safeguards matter most.
I have personally dealt with Uzbekistan related cases involving allegations of politically motivated prosecution, weak or untested evidence, commercial disputes escalating into criminal allegations, coercive financial demands and INTERPOL measures.
The consequences of getting an extradition decision wrong in such circumstances can be catastrophic. Ulugbek Shadmanov was extradited in the dark of night without due process and a young British man is facing extradition over a financial allegation related to his employer. The extradition process is increasingly misused as a way to have targets locked up abroad before any due process.
A UN Special Rapporteur previously recorded allegations concerning the secret detention and prospective extradition from the UAE to Uzbekistan of Jamshid Abdurasulov, including concerns about the risk of torture.
UAE Golden Visa holder seized by special forces
Update 09 Jan 2025: Yesterday, the UAE extradited Ulugbek Shadmanov to Uzbekistan without any judicial process. Uzbekistan joined BRICS on the 1st of January and have already extradited a target without having to go through the courts. Further updates shortly. Follow...
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Pakistan raises similar issues.
A September 2026 UK Government country assessment records allegations concerning arbitrary arrest and detention, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and torture or ill treatment. It also notes concerns regarding judicial independence, political influence, corruption and the effectiveness of criminal justice institutions. Last September, Muhammad Junaid Jahangir and Syed Salman Raza were detained by the UAE over their support for Prime Minister Imran Khan. His family filed an application with the UN over their arbitrary detention and torture.
This does not mean that every request is illegitimate but rather, that every request must be examined independently and rigorously rather than treated as an exercise in diplomatic cooperation. Unless there is a risk to public safety, bail should be presumed, whether in the UAE, or the USA as we see in the case of Andrew Tate.
The punishment can occur before extradition is ever approved
There is another serious problem that receives remarkably little attention.
An extradition request can punish somebody even when extradition is ultimately refused.
Under UAE legislation, a person can be detained urgently while an extradition request is awaited. The legislation provides for detention for up to 60 days in those circumstances and permits subsequent arrest or imprisonment following receipt of the extradition request.
Imagine spending weeks, months or years incarcerated while lawyers demonstrate that the foreign request is defective, politically motivated, disproportionate or unsupported by evidence.
The consequences can be devastating even where extradition is ultimately refused. A person may spend months in detention while their business collapses, their employment disappears, their family is left without support and their assets are frozen. At the same time, the mere reporting that they are “wanted internationally” can cause lasting reputational damage, while the cost of defending extradition proceedings can be enormous. If the request is eventually rejected, there is rarely any meaningful remedy for what has already been lost. There is no restoration of the months spent incarcerated, no automatic compensation for a destroyed business and no simple way to repair a reputation damaged by international allegations. An extradition victory after prolonged detention can therefore be a hollow victory. The proceedings themselves can become the punishment.
Wanted for prosecution or merely wanted for "questioning"?
Another practice deserving much greater scrutiny is the pursuit of individuals who have not actually been indicted for prosecution but are instead described as being wanted for investigation, interrogation or "questioning".
That distinction matters.
UAE legislation itself provides for surrender of suspects to foreign judicial authorities in order to be interrogated, tried or to serve sentences.
Yet INTERPOL describes Red Notices as concerning fugitives wanted either for prosecution or to serve a sentence following criminal proceedings in the requesting country.
Authorities should therefore be extremely cautious when international coercive measures are sought principally to secure someone's presence for investigation.
We have already seen European investigations where individuals were pursued across borders in connection with enormous financial investigations while prosecutors were still seeking to question them. In the European Cum Ex investigations, for example, Belgian prosecutors sought the extradition of British trader Guenther Klar for questioning in connection with an alleged tax fraud investigation.
International cooperation must not become a shortcut allowing investigators to arrest someone abroad first and determine whether there is a prosecutable case later.
The Danish tax cases should be studied carefully
The activities of the Danish Tax Agency, Skatteforvaltningen, commonly known as SKAT, demonstrate just how sprawling international financial enforcement can become.
Denmark pursued extensive civil litigation and criminal investigations internationally arising from the Cum Ex dividend tax controversy.
In proceedings involving Sanjay Shah, SKAT pursued litigation against dozens of defendants in the UK while Denmark simultaneously pursued criminal proceedings and ultimately secured Shah's extradition from Dubai.
The history is particularly noteworthy because Denmark did not initially have the necessary extradition framework with the UAE. Evidence subsequently recorded by a US federal court stated that Denmark negotiated an extradition treaty with the UAE that enabled Shah's extradition to Denmark for trial. Shah was subsequently convicted in Denmark and sentenced in December 2024 but critics agree the pursuit was economically and politically motivated and that the justice system was weaponized for profit.
The broader SKAT litigation also demonstrates why governments' characterisation of international financial disputes should never simply be accepted without scrutiny.
An English court initially dismissed SKAT's enormous civil claim in 2021 on the basis that it impermissibly sought to enforce foreign revenue law in England. SKAT disputed that interpretation and pursued an appeal.
None of this determines the merits of every individual Cum Ex prosecution. It demonstrates something more important for extradition policy: sophisticated Western democracies are perfectly capable of pursuing extraordinarily aggressive, multi jurisdictional enforcement strategies.
The risk of abuse cannot therefore be assessed simply by dividing requesting states into "good countries" and "bad countries".
Western governments require scrutiny too
There is an understandable tendency to associate abusive extradition practices with authoritarian governments.
That is too simplistic.
Western governments also engage in jurisdiction shopping.
When conduct touches several countries, prosecutors may have choices about where to prosecute, which offences to charge, which jurisdiction offers the most favourable procedural rules and from which country extradition will be easiest to obtain.
Increasingly dense networks of bilateral treaties create opportunities for governments to cooperate strategically.
This makes independent judicial scrutiny more important, not less.
An extradition court should ask why this jurisdiction is requesting the person. Where did the alleged conduct actually occur? Where are the witnesses? Where are the alleged victims? Has the individual actually been charged? Is prosecution genuinely contemplated? Is another jurisdiction already investigating the same conduct? Is the request being used principally to secure interrogation? Is there a parallel commercial dispute? Are assets the real objective?
And crucially, what diplomatic, economic or law enforcement interests exist between the requesting and requested states?
Extradition cannot become diplomatic quid pro quo.
Human beings cannot become currency in bilateral relationships.
UAE law already recognises these dangers
Interestingly, UAE legislation already contains important protections.
Its international judicial cooperation framework provides grounds for refusing extradition where there are substantial grounds for believing that a request has been made to prosecute or punish somebody because of race, religion, nationality or political opinion.
It also addresses circumstances in which a person may face torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or inadequate minimum guarantees in criminal proceedings.
Those safeguards are important.
But protections written into legislation only have value when courts have the time, independence, evidence and willingness to apply them robustly. The law is quite irrelevant when the rulers do deals with other countries, as we saw in the extradition of Christian Michel to India in exchange for India’s cooperation in seizing runaway princess Sheikha Latifa Al Maktoum.
That is why the UAE government's emphasis on ever faster extradition concerns me.
According to the Justice Minister, the UAE has reduced the average response time for voluntary extraditions to just five days.
Speed is not necessarily justice. Sometimes delay exists because fundamental rights are being examined.
Dubai is becoming a very different jurisdiction for expatriates
For years, people facing allegations elsewhere sometimes regarded Dubai as a jurisdiction where foreign disputes would not automatically follow them.
That era is clearly ending.
The UAE is building an increasingly sophisticated international enforcement infrastructure involving INTERPOL cooperation, extradition treaties, mutual legal assistance, financial intelligence, asset tracing and direct relationships between prosecutors and police forces.
For genuine organised crime cases, that cooperation can produce legitimate results.
But the same infrastructure can be used against a dissident, an entrepreneur involved in a politically connected commercial dispute, a former business partner targeted by a vindictive complainant or somebody caught in an aggressive international financial investigation.
The machinery does not know the difference.
That is why the dramatic 235 per cent increase in extradition requests to the UAE should not simply be celebrated as evidence of international confidence.
It should also prompt serious discussion about safeguards.
Every new extradition treaty increases the UAE's international influence, but it also increases the number of foreign governments capable of asking the Emirates to arrest someone. Given the UAE’s position as an international transport hub, even transit passengers can easily be targeted by countries engaging in ‘jurisdiction shopping’.
Every new police cooperation agreement creates opportunities to pursue serious criminals, but also creates another potential route for transnational repression. In some instances, transit passengers have been pulled off planes at the request of another country. Travellers are at serious risk if they choose the UAE as a flight hub.
Every improvement in asset tracing helps combat money laundering, but it also increases the consequences when allegations are false or commercially motivated.
Cooperation must never replace due process
Nobody should be protected from legitimate prosecution simply because they have money, influence or the ability to relocate internationally.
But equally, nobody should lose their liberty merely because a foreign government has labelled them "wanted".
Before the UAE arrests, detains, freezes the assets of or extradites an individual, there must be meaningful examination of the evidence, the procedural history, the motivation for the request, the requesting country's human rights record and the consequences of surrender.
INTERPOL notices must never be treated as findings of guilt.
Requests for "questioning" must not automatically justify months of incarceration.
Commercial disputes must be examined for criminalisation and weaponisation.
Political motivation and transnational repression must be actively investigated rather than presumed absent.
And extradition relationships with both authoritarian and Western governments must remain subject to genuinely independent judicial scrutiny.
The UAE's increasing integration into the international enforcement system undoubtedly makes it more difficult for genuine fugitives to hide.
But without equally rapid development of procedural safeguards, it can also make the country considerably less safe for innocent people who become targets of politically motivated, economically driven, extortive or vindictive international allegations.
International cooperation is valuable but international cooperation without rigorous due process is dangerous.
Radha Stirling is the founder of Detained in Dubai and CEO of Due Process International. She has worked on international extradition, INTERPOL, arbitrary detention and cross border human rights cases for almost two decades.
