Dubai, one of the seven members of the United Arab Emirates, is a small desert state with big ambitions to become a global player. Within a remarkably short period, and without the benefit of massive oil wealth, Dubai has established itself as a favoured long-haul sea-and-sun stopover, is developing rapidly into a luxury tourist destination and is now set on becoming the leading financial centre in the Arab world. It has already shown great leadership, conjuring opportunity and prosperity from sand. It has the potential to become the model of Arab modernity.

The indispensable means to the construction of a modern global financial centre are the foreign workers who swarm over the myriad construction sites of Dubai and staff its hotels. Dubai's indigenous population of around a quarter of a million is outnumbered six to one by South Asians, Westerners, East Asians and migrants from Iran and the Arab world. They are joined by some 800 new migrants every day.

Dubai claims to offer these guest workers equality under the law, in a society blending “Western” values with “Eastern traditions”. In business and finance, Dubai has worked hard to gain a reputation for impartial and speedy justice and effective protection for foreign investments.

But Dubai's secretive, unreliable and prejudice-ridden criminal justice system is another matter. This is no secret to mostly Indian and Pakistani construction workers, or to those few domestic servants who have dared to complain of ill-treatment to the courts. They have now found a 15-year-old champion, a Franco-Swiss boy who in July was kidnapped and then raped by three locals, two men and a youth who had previously raped an eight-year-old, all with criminal records and one of them HIV-positive. The boy and his parents fought tenaciously for justice, even at the risk of his ending up in prison instead of his attackers. They met with such incompetence, indifference and cultural bias that it is small wonder that the boy compares Dubai justice to that of the Middle Ages.

Emirates law does not recognise male rape, only the crime of “forced homosexuality”. His father took him immediately to the police, who heavily discouraged them from pressing charges before sending him for a culpably cursory medical examination. The doctor outrageously pressed the boy to admit that he was homosexual, a crime in Dubai, and was later falsely to testify that there was no evidence that force had been used. Even after the intervention of the Elysée Palace, no forensic science tests were carried out until weeks later. Worst of all, the family were told that blood tests on the three assailants were negative, when in fact the authorities knew that one of the men had tested HIV-positive in 2003 — and had thus knowingly put his victim's life at risk.

The 15-year prison sentences handed this week to each of the two adult defendants was a landmark in a country where the rape of minors is lightly punished or even not at all. Justice was, finally, done. But it was not seen to be done. “Confidentiality clauses” prevent judges from giving details of the convictions or even identifying the guilty. Dubai is not a democracy, but it does claim to be ruled by law, not the whim of men. With all its skyscrapers, if it cannot lay the foundation of a transparent system of justice, open to all, its ambitions will not be realised.