Human Rights Watch issued a report regarding the violation of the rights to freedom of expression in the United Arab Emirates. On 15 March 2017, Tayseer Najjar, a Jordanian journalist, was sentenced to a three-year prison term and a fine of 500,000 UAE Dirhams by Abu Dhabi Federal Appeals Court. He was charged with insulting the state's symbols and criticising Egypt, Israel and Gulf countries through comments he made on Facebook during Israeli military operations in Gaza in 2014, before he moved to the UAE. Ten days after preventing him to travel to Jordan for his wife and children on 3 December 2015, UAE authorities summoned al-Najjar to a police station in Abu Dhabi and detained him. They also prevented him to contact with a lawyer for more than a year before bringing him to trial in January 2017.