UAE says pardon for Matthew Hedges will be considered in context of close UK relations and could happen next week

Optimism that Matthew Hedges, the British academic jailed for life in the United Arab Emirates, will be released next week grew on Friday after the Hedges family pleaded for clemency, and the UAE said a pardon would be considered in the context of close British-UAE relations.

If nothing changes, it is likely Hedges will be released next Thursday, the UAE National Day and a time when traditionally as many as 1,000 people jailed for a range of offences are granted a pardon by the president.

Even as Hedges’ wife, Daniela Tejada, told the Guardian of the couple’s “nightmarish” six months since he was arrested, there was optimism on both sides that a pardon was imminent.

The UAE’s ambassador to London, Sulaiman Hamid al-Mazroui, said on Friday that Hedges’ family had “made a request for clemency and the government is studying that request”.

“The government does not dictate verdicts to the courts,” he added, dismissing criticism of the judicial process in the UAE from Hedges’ family and insisting that genuine academic researchers were able to visit his country “freely”.

“Matthew Hedges was not convicted after a five-minute trial as some have reported,” he said.

“This was an extremely serious case. We live in a dangerous neighbourhood and national security must be our top priority.”

He stressed the close relations that exist between the two countries.

The request for clemency for the 31-year-old academic would allow both sides to secure their goals – the UAE could claim its judicial system has not been impugned, and the British could hail Hedges’ release after a horrific six months spent largely in solitary confinement.

He is currently being held at the public prosecutor’s detention centre, where he can receive visitors, medical care and consular advice.

Despite the progress, there is concern that if his release does not occur next week, a crisis of mutual distrust between the two countries will grow, and his imprisonment will be protracted.

Speaking to the Guardian immediately after the ambassador’s statement on Friday morning, Tejada disputed his claims that the legal proceedings had been fair, saying: “There was certainly no due process in Matt’s case. The ambassador said this is a rare case and many researchers are able to undergo academic research in the UAE without encountering any problems. This is not true.

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“The fact is that he was put into solitary confinement for six months in an undisclosed location, given no legal counsel during the interrogation process or after and with extremely limited consular access.

“No number of judges or hearings could make up for that situation. They couldn’t make up for the fact that any extraction of a confession or evidence of material is completely illegitimate by international standards.

“A lot of researchers have been forbidden from even entering the country and some have been imprisoned for extended periods. Even an academic who is saying Matt is guilty and defaming his name on social media was detained last year for nearly four weeks over a tweet about freedom of speech. I don’t know how it is possible that he is saying that academics are free to go about their research without repercussions.”

She added: “Just to set the record straight, during any part of his research, Matt did not say anything which would have attacked the UAE’s integrity. As a matter of fact, he was – until May – very fond of the UAE. He considered it his second home.”

Hedges’ release may yet depend on whether the UAE takes offence either at any further criticism of the UAE legal system or if the existing unusually high level of diplomatic tension between the UAE and Britain worsens.

Although Hedges was arrested on espionage charges more than six months ago, the UAE, and its closest Gulf partner, Saudi Arabia, are unhappy at the pressure applied over the past two weeks by the British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to back a cessation of hostilities in Yemen.

Progress towards a resumption of peace talks in Yemen is largely due to the pressure being applied on the UAE and Saudis by the US and the UK. The UAE insists the Yemen dispute has no bearing on Hedges treatment.

The Saudis are also angry at the criticism thrown at them by Hunt over Saudi’s acknowledged murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (left) meets with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the UAE Armed Forces. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

Hunt has yet to exonerate the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and has repeatedly said everything in the Turkish press about the Saudi gang’s brutal killing of Khashoggi is true.

The Saudi crown prince - in his first visit abroad since the finger of suspicion was pointed at him over the Khashoggi case – travelled to Abu Dhabi, where he was enthusiastically greeted with a 21-gun salute by Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed.

The UAE also felt Hunt was misinformed when he angrily criticised the way in which a life sentence was handed down to Hedges at a five-minute hearing on Monday this week.

The UAE believes that at a meeting last week, Mohammed bin Zayed briefed Hunt that Hedges could not be released at what was effectively a formal reading of an already determined sentence.

Officials also believe Hedges had high-level access to UAE military figures, and relayed some of this information to the British embassy, making him a legitimate target of suspicion.

The sensitivity of the information exchanged is in dispute, but given the closeness of the British-UAE military relationship, others argue that only the most suspicious mind could regard Hedges’ conversations with the UK embassy as amounting to espionage.