UAE injustice

The case of Matthew Hedges, the British academic jailed for spying in Abu Dhabi, raises a number of troubling questions. The Government was caught completely by surprise by the sentence and it needs to be asked whether officials were taking a sufficiently close interest in the matter, given that he was charged with being an agent of the British state.

Mr Hedges says he was carrying out research on the security aspects of the Arab Spring for a PHD at Durham University. He was sentenced to life imprisonment after a hearing lasting just five minutes, without proper legal representation.

As he does not speak Arabic, Mr Hedges could not consult his court-appointed lawyers.

That is simply appalling and the British Government needs to bring the maximum influence it has to bear in order to expedite an appeal at which some evidence of espionage needs to be advanced by the UAE authorities. Mr Hedges’s wife, Daniela, alleged that her husband had been left to his own devices and no one at the Foreign Office took the case seriously enough.

However, Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, says he raised the case recently with the UAE authorities and had made clear on a number of occasions that there would be diplomatic repercussions if certain assurances he had received were not met. We need to be told more about what has gone on to secure a fair trial for Mr Hedges.

Every sovereign nation needs to administer its own laws, and visitors should be mindful of what they are and suffer the consequences if they are transgressed. But we are entitled to denounce a legal process that seems to have been utterly bereft of any due process.