It is no longer safe for British academics and students to work and study in the United Arab Emirates, experts and lecturers’ unions have warned, after a court in the Gulf state jailed for life a Durham PhD student accused of spying.

They said UK universities should urgently review their ties with the UAE in light of Matthew Hedges’ life imprisonment, and halt any planned projects, such as the University of Birmingham’s proposed £100m Dubai campus.

Staff at Birmingham University are due to vote on Thursday on an academic boycott of the Dubai campus, which opened in September. If the motion is backed, lecturers will refuse to teach on the campus or provide any support or materials for its courses.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, formerly of the London School of Economics (LSE), now a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute in the US, said Hedges’ life sentence was “a huge escalation” of the UAE’s restrictions on academic freedom.

“I’m stunned,” he said. “Until now the assumption was that if your research fell foul of the UAE authorities you’d be deported or barred from entering the country. This case changes everything.

“The message from this verdict is that the UAE is not a safe place to conduct research in. Western universities with connections to the UAE will now find it extremely hard to justify them. They urgently need to reconsider any research plans by staff and students and assess the very considerable risk that research may pose. The gap between this case and the glossy image of tolerance that the UAE tries to project has become impossible to reconcile.”

Several UK universities have branches in the UAE, including City University, the London Business School, Birmingham, Middlesex and Heriot-Watt. Gulf states have also provided millions of pounds of funding to the Middle East departments of other UK universities over the past decade, including the LSE, through large donations and endowed professorships.

James Brackley, the president of the Birmingham branch of the University and College Union (UCU), said Hedges’ imprisonment should be a wake-up call for the university’s management. “This has shocking consequences for academic freedom and it provokes major concern about our staff and students in Dubai,” he added.

The UCU’s national head of policy and campaigns, Matt Waddup, said: “British universities may be keen to launch overseas campuses in places like the UAE, but this case demonstrates that they need to seek stronger assurances on human rights and the treatment of academics.”

David Wearing, author of AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain, said Hedges’ detention was all the more troubling because he studied at two UK universities renowned for their research and expertise on the Gulf – Durham and Exeter.

He said: “They had signed off on his research ethics and methodology. His research was unimpeachable. There is no way he’s a spy.”

Wearing, a teaching fellow in international relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, said it would now be difficult for UK universities to reconcile their corporate and academic interests in the UAE. “If completely legitimate academic activity can’t be conducted in the UAE then why are universities there other than for money?”

Nicholas McGeehan, a human rights researcher working on the Gulf states, said: “The western universities who have gobbled up UAE money should be thinking seriously about the wisdom of having any sort of ties to a government that does this. If not swiftly followed by a pardon, academics with links to universities that have taken UAE money – LSE, Oxford, to name but a few – need to exercise their collective power and stand up to these thugs.”



