DUBAI — A Norwegian woman who told police she had been raped and wound up sentenced to prison by a Dubai court for having had illicit sex says she has no regrets about coming forward if her experience protects others from a similar fate.
Interior designer Marte Deborah Dalelv, 24, was slapped last Wednesday with 16 months behind bars for having sex outside marriage, drinking and making false statements. She’d said she had a few drinks with a colleague who later pulled her into his hotel room and forced himself on her.
Dalelv has been released on condition that she remain inside a Norwegian Christian center in Dubai pending an appeal.
Her story has dominated the front pages in Norway and raised questions about the judicial system in a Gulf state nation that lures expatriates and tourists with a Western lifestyle but that has little-publicized conservative laws on its books covering sex and alcohol.
The Britain-based Emirates Center for Human Rights says there’s been a string of cases in which women reporting rape in Dubai ended up in prison.
It cited three: A British expat claiming that she was raped by three men was fined for drinking alcohol, an Emirati woman was sentenced to a year in prison after claiming to have been gang-raped, and an Australian was sent to prison for 11 months after she, too, report having been raped by numerous men.