“When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends,” goes an old Japanese proverb. This gem of wisdom serves as a good rule of thumb in life — not just for individuals, but even more so for states.

The U.S. constantly presents itself as the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy, but its allies are anything but. In fact, America has for many decades aligned itself with some of the most dictatorial and repressive regimes in the world: the Gulf monarchies.

This week, two cases exemplify just how authoritarian U.S.-allied Gulf states are.

On Oct. 20, the U.N. urged the Qatari regime to release Mohammed al-Ajami, a poet who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for speaking negatively of the royal family. Al-Ajami was arrested in 2011 for reciting a poem in his house that criticized the prince of Qatar and lauded the pro-democracy Tunisian Revolution.

Qatar’s absolute monarchy first considered executing the outspoken poet, but decided to be a bit more generous and instead just throw him in a dungeon for the rest of his life. An appeal in 2013 reduced the sentence to a much more charitable 15 years.

U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye warned that the imprisonment of al-Ajami is an affront to “the peaceful exercise of his fundamental human rights.” Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers Mónica Pinto added that the lengthy “prison sentence against this poet is also particularly worrying, as we have received serious indications that the criminal process did not meet all the judicial guarantees of a fair trial.” What exactly a “fair trail” means in the first place, when someone is arrested over a poem, is something worth further deliberation.

The next day, on Oct. 21, Bahrain’s monarchy sentenced human rights activist Zainab al-Khawaja to a year in prison and fined her thousands of dollars for ripping up a photo of the king. She had originally faced a three-year sentence for the peaceful protest.

Human rights organization Amnesty International blasted the Bahraini regime for the punishment. Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa James Lynch said the court’s decision “is a vindictive assault on freedom of expression and offers yet another example of the Bahraini authorities’ use of oppressive tactics to silence peaceful activists.”

Al-Khawaja has been hit with a variety of other charges for similar non-violent acts of dissent. In the past four years, she has been arrested and detained numerous times.

Her father Abdulhadim Al-Khawaja, himself a renowned human rights activist, was sentenced to life in prison for helping lead peaceful pro-democracy protests in 2011.