United Arab Emirates (UAE) Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi confirmed on Saturday the mass referral of 84 people to the State Security Court on charges related to violence and terrorism, reported Emirates News Agency (WAM), the state’s official news outlet.

Amongst the detainees are Sultan Bin Kayed Al-Qasim, Nasser Bin Ghaith, Muhammed Al-Roken and Ahmad Mansoor, a prominent rights activist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $272,000 in 2018 for criticizing the government in social media posts. Officials say the detained prisoners are related to the organization of Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamic transnational organization categorized as a terrorist group by the country. Dissidents and human rights groups in the country have criticized the arrests and mass trial as arbitrary and politically-motivated.

The referrals and trial were first reported by the Emirates Detainees Advocacy Centre (EDAC) in December, who said proceedings were ongoing during the UAE-hosted United Nations COP28 conference. WAM reports that the investigations commenced six months prior to the referral, which prosecutors say provided enough evidence of the crime. Officials say that legal representation was given to each person arrested.

EDAC has repeatedly condemned the trial and claimed the charges are fabricated, stating that it is a breach of the UAE constitution. It has accused the authorities of “secret sessions,” of preventing lawyers from seeing a copy of the indictments and of depriving the defendants from communicating with their lawyers. It has also emphasized that several human rights organizations joined them in condemning, “the UAE authorities’ use of the criminal justice system as a tool to keep these individuals behind bars and suppress peaceful criticism or any calls for reform.”

Amnesty International called the trial a “shameless contempt for human rights.” Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Aya Majzoub, stated that conducting the trial at the same time as COP28 was “intended to send a clear message to the world that it will not tolerate the slightest peaceful dissent and that the authorities have no intention of reforming the country’s dire rights record.” Majzoub urged authorities to “immediately release all arbitrarily detained prisoners, drop charges against them and end their ruthless assault on human rights and freedoms”.

WAM said that the court has begun hearing witnesses amid the ongoing trial proceedings.