Read the Al Maktoum cases and the Saudi case side by side and the same architecture appears in both, despite different countries, different families and two decades between them. Nobody goes to prison. The woman stays in a house — often a very comfortable house. There are staff. Some of the staff are medical. And at some point a diagnosis appears which explains why nothing she says about her own situation should be believed.

This piece is about why that arrangement is so resistant to law.

1. A house is not a prison, legally speaking

Detention normally leaves a trail: an arrest, a charge, a custody record, a facility with a name. Confinement in a private residence leaves none of that. There is no register to inspect, no visiting regime to demand access to, and no authority that formally admits to holding anyone.

Human rights lawyers argue that this makes no legal difference. Under international law the test for arbitrary detention is whether a person is deprived of liberty without lawful basis and without the ability to challenge it — not whether the building has bars. On that reading, a guarded villa is a place of detention and the guards make it a state matter.

The counter-argument, advanced by the governments concerned, is that these are family arrangements for the care of relatives, made under domestic law that gives families a role in the welfare of their members, and that outsiders are mistaking custom and concern for coercion. That argument has never been tested in an open hearing with the women present, which is why it neither collapses nor persuades.

2. The medical layer

The element that recurs most consistently is medical. In the Dubai case, Sheikha Latifa alleged that her sister was supervised by nurses and a psychiatrist and given drugs intended to control her. In the Saudi case, UN experts were told the sisters could not choose their own doctors and received treatment and medication without informed consent. When the UAE responded to international pressure in 2021, its statement was that Latifa was being cared for at home by family and medical professionals.

Clinically, this is what psychiatrists call a dual-loyalty problem: a doctor paid by, employed by and reporting to the person who wants the patient contained cannot be an independent assessor of that patient. Medical ethics bodies treat consent, independent assessment and the right to a second opinion as the safeguards that separate psychiatric treatment from confinement by another name. None of those safeguards operates when the household is also the employer.

It should be said plainly that a person in these circumstances may also be genuinely unwell — long confinement itself causes serious psychological harm. The objection is not that a diagnosis is impossible. It is that a diagnosis produced under these conditions cannot be verified, and is being used to answer the very question it should be independent of.

3. Guardianship

Several Gulf legal systems have historically required women to obtain a male relative’s permission for decisions such as travel, marriage and some employment. Saudi Arabia has substantially reformed its rules since 2019, including allowing adult women to obtain passports and travel independently; researchers at organisations such as Human Rights Watch argue that significant elements survive in practice, particularly in family law and in the ability of a male relative to file complaints against a woman who leaves home.

The relevance here is narrow but important. Where a legal system already allocates control over an adult woman’s movement to a male relative, confinement by that relative does not look, from inside the system, like a crime requiring investigation. It looks like the system working.

4. Who could investigate — and why they do not

Three routes exist in theory.

Domestic police in the country where an act happened. When Shamsa Al Maktoum was taken from Cambridge, English criminal law applied. Cambridgeshire police investigated and concluded the available evidence was insufficient; officers were unable to travel to the UAE to pursue enquiries. Foreign policy considerations were cited when related documents were withheld. Whatever view one takes of that, it shows the limit: a domestic force cannot compel co-operation from a sovereign state that declines to give it.

Civil courts abroad. The findings about Shamsa and Latifa exist because Princess Haya’s custody case put them in front of an English judge. But a family court decides the case before it. It can protect the children of the litigant in front of it. It cannot order the release of women in another country who are not parties to the proceedings.

United Nations mechanisms. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the special rapporteurs on torture and on violence against women, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights can all receive complaints, write to governments and publish opinions. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have ratified the UN Convention against Torture, and both are parties to the convention on discrimination against women, with reservations. What none of these bodies has is enforcement. They can ask for proof of life. They cannot obtain it.

5. The immunity problem

Serving heads of state and heads of government enjoy broad immunity from the criminal and civil jurisdiction of foreign courts while in office. That is a rule states maintain because they all benefit from it, and it applies regardless of the seriousness of the allegation, outside a narrow set of international criminal courts. It is one reason these cases produce findings of fact rather than convictions: an English judge can record what he believes happened, but the machinery that would normally follow such a finding does not engage.

6. What would actually resolve it

Campaigners in these cases have converged on a small, unglamorous demand: independent access. Not sanctions, not prosecutions — a private meeting between the woman concerned and someone who does not work for her family, followed by a published account of what she says she wants.

That is the one thing that has not happened in any of these cases. Photographs have been released. Assurances have been given. A former UN human rights commissioner attended a lunch in Dubai in 2018 and later said she believed she had been misled. Until an independent visit takes place, every subsequent development — including genuinely good news — arrives in a form that cannot be checked.

That is not a satisfying conclusion. It is, however, the accurate one, and it is worth resisting the pull towards either of the tidier stories: that these women are certainly still captive, or that the pictures prove they are fine.

Sources

Drawn from the published judgments of the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales; UN special procedures communications and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights statements; Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reporting on both countries; and statements issued by the governments concerned.