How a Dubai princess tried to escape the Emirate using a fake Irish passport

For a number of days in late February 2018, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, the daughter of the United Arab Emirates’ prime minister, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, stayed on a yacht on the Arabian Sea. It was all part of her plan to flee the Sheikhdom, a plot she had been working on for several years.

Ms Latifa had set out by a dinghy and jet ski a few days earlier, before arriving at the pre-purchased boat that was located at a point nearly 27km off the coast of Oman, according to an article published recently in the New Yorker magazine.

The plan was then to sail to India or Sri Lanka, and Ms Latifa would use a fake Irish passport to fly to the US. However, before that could happen, she was detained by commandos in a boat off India.

She was not the first daughter of the Sheikh who sought to escape Dubai, with her older sister Shamsa attempting an escape in July 2000. It was also not Ms Latifa’s first attempt to flee, having initially sought freedom when she was 16, after which she said she was beaten.

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[ Dubai princess used fake Irish passport during 2018 escape attempt ]

In a report to the United Nations in 2021, Human Rights Watch (HRW), an international NGO that conducts research and advocacy on human rights, confirmed there are several incidents of Emirati women fleeing abusive family members.

The organisation said there had been women’s rights reforms in the UAE in recent years, but there remained “significant discrimination against women and girls in law and practice”.

Laws pertaining to the protection of domestic violence victims were introduced in 2020, which defines domestic violence as abuse, violence or a threat that exceeds guardianship.

However, according to HRW, this suggests “authorities can decide at what point male guardians have gone beyond their authority in disciplining their wives, female relatives, and children”.

Furthermore, the December 2021 penal code reintroduced the criminalisation of consensual nonmarital sex, which had been dropped from the older law as part of amendments introduced a year previous. Under the 2021 law, if men and women have sex outside of marriage, the act carries a penalty of no less than six months’ imprisonment.

Sodomy, or anal sex, with an adult male is also criminalised under the law. In both cases, the offences can only be prosecuted on the basis of a complaint by a husband or male guardian, the HRW said.

Under the Federal Personal Status Law, a woman needs a male guardian’s permission to marry. A married woman can lose her right to spousal maintenance from her husband if she refuses to have sexual relations with her husband without “a lawful excuse”. Men can also unilaterally divorce their wives, whereas a woman must apply for a court order to obtain a divorce, the HRW added.

Amnesty International has also been critical of UAE’s reforms. At the time, it said its review of the texts of law available found that the changes largely do not apply to Emirati women, creating a two-tier system for the treatment of women.

According to David Haigh, a UK human rights lawyer who said he helps people in similar situations, women trying to leave the country illegally is quite common.

Ms Latifa was only “the top of the tree; there are so many others,” he said.

“The women there, if they’re a local family, because of this so-called thing called male guardianship, they’re not allowed work, drive or have passports unless a man in their family agrees,” Mr Haigh said.

“Latifa is a very extreme example, but it is very common in Emirati families that women don’t have their passports. So if they want to leave, it’s either illegally over a border in the boot of a car or you use some kind of fake travel document.”

These two methods of escape are “very, very risky” as if they get caught they tend to “get in a million times more trouble than they were already in”, Mr Haigh, who was part of the Free Latifa campaign, said.

Mr Haigh said that Ms Latifa told him that she paid between €200,000 or €300,000 for her fake Irish passport, which he described as “crazy money” when the going rate for was about €30,000 to €40,000.

“Like everything else in her bid for freedom, she was taken advantage of significantly,” he said.

Her fake Irish passport carried a photograph of the princess but the name Justina Louise Coiley, purportedly born in Co Antrim and with the same birth year as Ms Latifa: 1983.

“If you have an Arabic lady and she’s going through border control with an Irish passport and a name like Shannon, clearly if they look at it, it’s obviously not her,” he added.

Mr Haigh became a human rights campaigner focused on the Gulf, and the UAE in particular after he spent nearly two years in jail in Dubai. In 2015, he was found guilty by a Dubai court of embezzling nearly £4 million (€4.5 million) from GFH Capital, a Middle East private equity firm that had owned Leeds United, a charge he has continuously denied.

The Yorkshire-born solicitor and activist – a former managing director of Leeds United – has maintained his innocence and said he was abused and tortured while in prison. He was released in 2016 and declared bankrupt in 2020 after a British court ordered him to repay the money.

Outside of women attempting to leave Dubai, Mr Haigh said a similar situation occurs for expats or other workers, who have been convicted of debt-related crimes, who seek to illegally escape the country.

“Their original passport has been taken off them by the police. So they end up in this cycle in which you can’t leave the country because you don’t have a passport, yet because you don’t have a passport, you can’t get a job, so you can’t get a visa, so you literally get locked in a country, unable to work, unable to pay your debt or whatever it may be and you can’t leave,” he says.

“Criminal gangs know this and that’s why they go over there and try to sell them fake documents.”

The Dubai Embassy in Dublin did not respond to requests for comment on how often falsified passports are used in Dubai.

It is not just human rights cases in which falsified documents are used. According to Dr Alex Chance, senior research fellow at the Azure Forum, which provides and promotes independent peace, security and defence research, fake Irish passports are sought after by organised crime gangs.

“From a criminal perspective, the attractiveness of a particular passport is more or less aligned with the attractiveness of that passport to any other person,” he said.

According to the Henley Passport Index, the Irish passport was ranked as the joint sixth most powerful passport in the world for 2023, along with the UK, French and Portuguese passports.

“It gives you mobility to travel, in some cases to live and claim certain social welfare benefits in certain jurisdictions,” Dr Chance said. “Last year, with an Irish passport, you could travel visa-free to 187 countries.”

Dr Chance said that just as the number of applications for Irish passports from Britain increased after Brexit, it is likely there will be a commensurate rise in the number of British-organised crime gangs seeking to obtain falsified Irish documents.

“Also, for British criminals, it’s relatively easy to pass for a national from Ireland. Officials from other countries or jurisdictions wouldn’t necessarily pick up on the nuance of accents from particular places,” he added.

Similarly, garda sources told The Irish Times they believed the demand for fraudulently-obtained genuine (FOG) Irish passports was increasing since Britain had left the European Union. They pointed out FOG Irish passports were now more valuable than ever to British criminals.

They allowed them to travel internationally undetected but also overcame the shortcomings of British passports as a result of Brexit, allowing holders all the freedoms of an EU member state passport, the sources said.

Last week, three men were jailed in Britain for supplying FOG passports to British and Irish criminals, including Kinahan cartel founded Christy Kinahan Snr. During that trial, it emerged some of the passports had fetched £25,000, or €29,000.

Gardaí believed similar prices, or perhaps slightly less, could be paid for a FOG Irish passport. However, they stressed a price could be significantly inflated in high-risk circumstances.

This included cases where the fraudulent passport was likely to come to the attention of the authorities at some point or if the person seeking the passport was especially vulnerable, perhaps because they were being sought by police.

The Department of Foreign Affairs said the passport service has made significant investment in recent years on counter fraud measures including anti-fraud technology and have implemented robust processes to ensure the integrity of the Irish passport is maintained.