The Climate Summit is one of the most ‘watched’ events in the world. More than 12,000 security cameras They monitor the venue where COP28 attendees move, and Human Rights Watch activists have already denounced that they feel like one of the targets of this espionage.
Joey Shea, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, assures that they have had to assume how “At every point in this conference that someone is watching, “someone is listening.”
From Amnesty International, Marta Schaaf, assures that some people who could not be identified were observing, very carefully, those who were speaking at the conference or those who were behind the speakers. “We feel intimidated”he assured.
Something that seems to be repeated when these Climate Summits are held in Arab countries: “Last year (in Egypt) we saw very visible intimidation. This year everything is much more clever,” Schaaf said.
What is worrying is how the country uses these images. The surveillance cameras belong to an Emirati company that has been accused of espionage for its links with a mobile application which was actually a spy program.
According to a Human Rights Watch report, in Dubai alone, there are at least 300,000 of these cameras monitoring public spaces. In addition, the city’s airport, one of the busiest in the world, has a facial recognition system that adds to this extensive surveillance network of the Arab country.