ill-treated in jail. During the detention, he was denied access to a lawyer for over six months and held in solitary confinement at a secret detention facility for four days after his arrest. During the 2017 Qatar diplomatic crisis, Hamad Saif al-Shamsi, the Attorney-General of the United Arab Emirates announced on 7 June that publishing expressions of sympathy towards Qatar through social media, or any type of written, visual or verbal form is considered illegal under UAE's Federal Penal Code and the Federal law on Combating Information Technology Crimes. Violators of this offence face between 3 and 15 years imprisonment, a fine of up to 500,000 Emirati dirhams ($136,000) or both. In March 2017, UAE's prominent economist, academic and human rights defender Dr Nasser bin Ghaith was arrested and imprisoned for 10 years, for his comments on Twitter related to the treatment he received during his previous arrest. Amnesty International condemned and criticised the arrest, asking for his immediate release – which is still pending. Ghaith went on a hunger strike in October 2018; his health has been deteriorating since then. Also, he was denied access to a lawyer during his trial period and still awaits justice. According to Amnesty International, Israeli company NSO Group's Pegasus spyware was used to target human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor. citizen Lab's August 2016 report, "The Million Dollar Dissident", documents the attempts made to infect Mansoor's phone with Pegasus spyware. On 20 March 2020, Amnesty International and the Gulf Centre for Human Rights wrote a joint-letter and called for the immediate and unconditional release of rights activist Ahmed Mansoor. The groups also called the UAE as an "incubator of tolerance". In April 2020, the authorities in the United Arab Emirates introduced criminal penalties for the spread of misinformation and rumours related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Arab Emirates. On 11 May 2020, a US-based gulf rights group, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain in its report said that "impunity in the United Arab Emirates is endemic." Their study documented tactics used by Emirati authorities to stifle dissidents, besides revealing use of torture against those recognised as imminent threat to national security. "This ‘threat' most commonly includes human rights defenders, political opposition, religious figures, and journalists," a statement from the report read. In June 2020, International Campaign for Freedom in the UAE (ICFUAE) informed that the UAE continues to detain human