WHEN the terrible plight of Princess Latifa Al Maktoum, the daughter of Dubai’s ruler, was highlighted this week, it raised many more questions than it answered.

Watching the secret video messages that Princess Latifa, who tried to flee the country in 2018, sent to friends was truly shocking.

In the footage, shown on BBC1’s Panorama programme, she accused her father of holding her “hostage” as she feared for her life.

She also described being drugged by commandos after she was caught fleeing the country by boat and then sent back to detention.

Somehow, it’s hard to believe the assurances from Dubai and the UAE that Princess Latifa is “safe in the care of family”, partly because her messages have now stopped. Friends are urging the UN to step in.

Former UN rights envoy Mary Robinson met Latifa in 2018 and described her as a “troubled young woman” — but now says she was “horribly tricked” by the princess’s family.

But this story has raised some seriously disturbing — and perhaps lesser known — facts about the rights of women in Dubai.

Although women there are increasingly becoming business and government leaders, the Emirates also enforces the law of male guardianship.

That essentially means that women, along with all their moves, are controlled by their husbands and fathers.

In order to work, women need permission from their husbands. If they do not want to have sex with their husband they must have a “lawful excuse”.

Any unmarried women, including expat women, who turn up pregnant to hospital can be arrested. That includes, by the way, women who are miscarrying.

The other disturbing fact is that any woman who divorces her Emirati husband and seeks to remarry faces having to grant full custody of her children to the first husband.

All of this is worth reflecting on because it is so entirely at odds with our more familiar associations with Dubai as the HQ of glitz and glamour.

I know I am certainly having a rethink, as I have been there a few times, appreciating the weather but not reflecting on the conditions the women who live there are subjected to.