Few people can say they have advised a hostage princess, run one of the biggest clubs in English football, survived one of the world’s most brutal jails, and won a ten-year fight to clear their own name. David Haigh has done all four, and he did not merely live to tell it: he turned what was done to him into a life spent helping others. He first stepped into public life at Leeds United in 2012 and has never quite left it since; the story only grew larger and stranger, first his own, and then the lives of the people he now fights to save. Those who work with him call him extraordinary, inspirational, indomitable, a human rights hero, and, in the next breath, remarkably down to earth. Hostage princesses, billionaires, journalists, celebrities and everyday families alike have put their trust, and sometimes their lives, in his hands; his own story has run everywhere from a spread in Hello to the front pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC and Fox News, and an entire episode of BBC HARDtalk.
David Haigh is an international human rights lawyer, crisis manager, writer and broadcaster: one of the most prominent and respected voices on injustice in Dubai and the wider UAE, and a leading authority on lifting abusive Interpol red notices. He has practised and worked at the highest levels of law and finance around the world, in the UK, the Caribbean, and across the Gulf in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain. He began at a leading Mayfair firm, moved to two of the largest law firms on earth, Britain’s DLA Piper and America’s Akin Gump, and to global institutions including Barclays, BNY Mellon and Citco. By his late twenties he was chief operating officer, and then one of the youngest deputy chief executives, of a major Islamic investment banking group, running the Gulf’s first wholly Islamic technology fund, worth fifty million dollars, and structuring the world’s first wholly Islamic-finance takeover of an English football club, Leeds United. At 34 he became the club’s managing director: the youngest, and the first openly gay MD, in top-flight English football, credited by PinkNews with helping to “pave the way for openly gay players and managers in football.”
Then, almost overnight, everything changed. From the world of high finance, multi-million-dollar private-equity funds and Premier League football, he was lured back to Dubai in 2014, where its weak and corrupt courts, police and prosecutors were turned against him in the worst kind of legal thuggery. He endured 22 months of arbitrary detention and torture, finally receiving a pardon and acquittal. His account of that treatment has since been accepted in full by a UK court.
Since his release in 2016 his life’s work has been Britons and others facing injustice abroad, including members of Dubai’s ruling family itself. He was lawyer and crisis manager to HRH Princess (Sheikha) Latifa Al Maktoum, the Dubai ruler’s daughter, and co-founded the global #FreeLatifa campaign; he advised Sheikha Randa Al Banna, the first wife of Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and assisted the legal team behind HRH Princess Haya, his most recent wife, whose case ended in a landmark £554 million High Court settlement. The first wife and the last. He has quietly counselled many other Dubai and Saudi royals whose cases have never been made public. Today he stands with Zeynab Javadli, the Azerbaijani former international rhythmic gymnast and ex-wife of Sheikh Saeed bin Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler’s nephew, in the fight for her three daughters, and with countless others, from wronged tourists to a billionaire and a leading oil and gas executive. He has helped hundreds of people caught in injustice across the Gulf, and brought many of them safely home from jail, torture and abusive legal processes.
Feared, and listened to
David Haigh is the human rights lawyer the government of Dubai and the wider UAE has most reason to fear. He is feared because he wins: because he brings justice to those he helps, and because he commands a platform, forged in the glare of English football and sharpened across a decade of television, radio and news, that can turn the world’s cameras on the abuses the Emirates would rather keep in the dark. He is feared, above all, because he understands the machinery from the inside: how Dubai’s courts, its police and its power really work, who to call, and when.
That is the likeliest reason he was hacked, not once but twice. First came a spear-phishing operation run for the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah through the US law firm Dechert, using mercenary hackers whose paymasters were later found by the English courts to have kidnapped, harassed and intimidated their targets. Then came Pegasus, the military-grade spyware sold by the Israeli firm NSO Group, confirmed on his phone by Amnesty International, splashed across the front pages of the Washington Post and The Guardian, and the subject of a BBC documentary. He was, and remains, feared. He is also, tellingly, listened to: time and again, the mere prospect of his involvement, and the attention that travels with him, has been enough to prevent or end an injustice.
He fought his own battle for ten years, and won. It took ten years only because he put the people he was helping first, judging their lives more important than his own reputation. In March 2025, orders from both the Dubai and English courts dismissed every remaining claim against him. He celebrated on the summit of Kilimanjaro.
He is the founder of Haigh International Justice, his international human rights and crisis firm, and of the NGO Detained International; and co-founder of Dubai Watch and the Geneva-based Association for Victims of Torture in the UAE. He speaks regularly at the United Nations, representing Princess Latifa, Zeynab Javadli and many others. Regularly instructed as an expert witness in UAE extradition cases, he campaigns against corruption inside Interpol and the judiciary itself, calling for a UK register of judicial interests and an end to English judges sitting in foreign courts while still serving at home.
He has been shortlisted for Lawyer of the Year and In-house General Counsel of the Year at the Lawyer Awards and the Law360 awards, and named among the leading lawyers in the UK, Dubai and the Middle East. At the National Diversity Awards he has been nominated for Positive Role Model five years running, from 2021 to 2026, making the shortlist in 2021, and for Lifetime Achievement in 2025 and 2026. A 250 km husky-sled trek across the Arctic raised tens of thousands for Make-A-Wish. After London, the Middle East and the Caribbean, he lives in his childhood home of Cornwall, England, by the beach, a cold-water swimmer and a vegan baker, with Everest in his sights after summiting Kilimanjaro in 2025.
