In criticizing the British government for not doing enough to help her husband, the academic Matthew Hedges, Daniela Tejada is not alone. She joins a long list of victims and their families who assumed the British government would go into bat for them, only to be sorely disappointed.
The plight of Hedges, who was convicted of spying and given a life prison sentence, evokes my own experience. When I was lured to Dubai in 2014 and thrown into prison without charge, I eagerly awaited the first visit of officials from the British embassy. Yet all I got were two non-Brits hired by a diplomatic staffing agency, and all they said they could do was ensure I was being treated reasonably and getting adequate food.
There was no attempt to protest about the disregard of all basic judicial principles. They even failed by their own remit, as they didn’t get me the food I needed (I’d just had stomach surgery).
The conditions I was kept in were, at times, appalling. There were beatings, I was raped and at one stage a guard said to me, “Be careful, British prisoners die here.” It was hot, there was overcrowding, and access to lawyers and other personal representatives was often limited to a few minutes a week, with a guard listening in.
In my 22 months’ incarceration, I had one humane head of the prison, but he was quickly demoted to a lesser jail after trumped-up charges were leveled alleging he had taken bribes. The authorities clearly don’t want prisoners to be treated humanely.
Others have had the same experience of Gulf justice, along with the advice from the British embassy that it would be unwise to go public as this would only antagonize the Emiratis.
When I got out and started campaigning to help others held in Dubai, we knocked that on the head. High-profile cases such as those of Jamie Harron, Billy Barclay, and Ellie Holman were ultimately successful because we did go public, and in a way that threatened Dubai’s reputation as a tourism destination. Harron and Barclay were “pardoned” for crimes they didn’t commit, which sticks in the craw, but at least we got them out.
It was clear the embassy’s credo was that the plight of a few individuals shouldn’t be allowed to hamper the UK’s good trading relations with the UAE, but the Hedges case suggests the government’s appeasement has achieved nothing. Publicity isn’t an issue here – this is now a global story – but the Emiratis still refuse to be embarrassed into releasing Hedges – conceding only on Friday that they were considering the family’s appeal for clemency.
There are four things the government should be doing.
First, revise its travel advice. The UAE’s economy depends heavily on tourism, but people who go there have no idea that if they fall foul of the law they can’t rely on internationally accepted norms of justice. You sup with the devil when you go to the Emirates, and the foreign office should make this clear. (That includes urging Emirates airline to warn passengers that if they drink on a flight they could easily be arrested when they land in Dubai.)
Second, revise its investment guidance. The UK still encourages firms to invest in Emirati companies with the implicit assumption that they face fair business conditions. Again, the judicial situation makes it a highly risky country to do business with.
Third, suspend Britain’s extradition treaty with the UAE. British judges have made a succession of judgments confirming that UK nationals won’t get a fair trial in the UAE, yet we still have an extradition treaty under which the Emirates apply to get people they don’t like sent to face show trials, such as the five-minute Hedges hearing this week. And because we give people fair trials here, extradition requests cost the British taxpayer millions.
Fourth, stop British judges from taking retirement postings in the UAE. It is little appreciated that when British judges retire they can pick up lucrative part-time work in the Dubai finance courts, yet they merely reinforce the unjust Dubai legal system by giving it respectability it doesn’t deserve.
Of one thing we can be sure: the treatment of Hedges and others is not anti-British. The UAE is as vicious with its own citizens as it is with foreigners, as the case of Sheikha Latifa, the daughter of Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, shows. Earlier this year she came to us for help as she tried to escape Dubai, citing years of abuse and torture in the royal palace, and got as far as Indian coastal waters before UAE troops violently kidnapped her and took her back to Dubai. She hasn’t been seen since.
Her story, and that of the kidnap of her sister Sheikha Shamsa in the UK, will feature in a BBC2 documentary on 6 December. It confirms that we’re dealing with a vicious regime acting with impunity, similar to that in Saudi Arabia but with better PR. Getting rid of that regime will not happen overnight, but the cases of Latifa, Hedges, me and many others dictate that we should give the UAE no support, and the British government should take the hardest possible line in both its advice to UK nationals and its dealings with the Emiratis.
David Haigh is the former managing director of Leeds United, a lawyer, and a justice campaigner