DUBAI - DUBAI – Thanks to its strategic location, booming real estate market and especially high concentration of extremely wealthy individuals, Dubai emerged last year as the most important non-European destination for Belgian business travellers. Journalist Filip Michiels and photographer Isabel Pousset travelled to the small emirate on behalf of Vacature magazine, discovering that Dubai has a great deal more to offer the weary business traveller in the form of prostitutes. They populate the bars and nightclubs of dozens of luxury hotels, in every colour, size and nationality. In their thousands.
Internationally renowned hotel chains such as Radisson and Hyatt are complicit in this lucrative business, earning thousands of euros in the process. Although prostitution is strictly forbidden in this Islamic country, immigration services, the police and local establishments happily turn a blind eye to it. Furthermore, they equally enjoy the forbidden fruit, earning lots of money by importing women from Eastern Europe and Asia, while, for appearances' sake only, taking action against the most extreme excesses of human trafficking.
Filip Michiels won the 2010 Vlaamse Citi Prijs (the Citi Journalistic Excellence Prize) for this project.
MAGAZINE
- Undercover in Dirty Dubai, Vacature Magazine, 30/05/2009.
