"Alkarama welcomes the decision of the Omani authorities," says Alkarama's Regional Legal Officer for the Gulf countries, Radidja Nemar, explaining that "arbitrary deprivations of liberty are not only limited to detentions in prison." In an Opinion issued on 20 May 2014 by the Human Rights Council on the case of a Chinese petitioner who suffered a lengthy detention in a psychiatric hospital, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention recalled that "psychiatric detention should not be used to jeopardize someone's freedom of expression," and adopted the view that Xing Shiku had been detained arbitrarily in violation of article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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