This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The family of a British academic who was convicted of spying in the United Arab Emirates has appealed for clemency, the country’s ambassador to the UK has said.

Sulaiman Almazroui said in London on Friday that his government was considering the appeal and would respond in due course but he defended the process under which Matthew Hedges was convicted.

The jailing of Hedges, a 31-year-old Durham University PhD student, sparked a public outcry this week, with the Gulf state being accused of a miscarriage of justice.

In a televised press statement Almazroui said: “Matthew Hedges was not convicted after a five-minute show trial, as some have reported. Over the course of one month, three judges evaluated compelling evidence in three hearings.

“They reached their conclusions after a full and proper process. This was an extremely serious case. We live in a dangerous neighbourhood and national security must be a top priority.

“Mr Hedges’s family have made a request for clemency and the government is studying that request. The British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, had a good conversation yesterday with our foreign minister.

“Like the UK, the UAE is a country with an independent judiciary. The government does not dictate verdicts to the court.”

He emphasised the close ties between Britain and the UAE, adding: “Because of the strength of that relationship we are hopeful that an amicable solution can be reached.”

Hedges’s wife, Daniela Tejada confirmed that an appeal for clemency had been lodged with the UAE government, adding: “We will wait to see what happens.”

By tradition the UAE grants pardons for jailed offenders on the country’s national day, which falls next Thursday.

The request for clemency may involve the Hedges family in some admission of guilt, but this could be seen as a price worth paying if there is an implicit understanding between the Foreign Office and the UAE government that a request will be followed by a pardon and his release.

The ambassador’s statement followed consultations in the UAE overnight on Thursday with the foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, and a phone conversation described as “constructive” between Hunt and Zayed on Thursday.

The Foreign Office is increasingly optimistic that the UAE, a longstanding British ally, wants to avoid a diplomatic confrontation, or finding itself in the same basket as Saudi Arabia, a country that is suffering reputationally as a result of the killing of the Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi state agents.

Tejada had said she believed the UK government had been putting its interests above her husband’s fight for freedom.

She said she had spoken to her husband on Thursday night and he had complained of feeling unwell.

Hedges, originally from Exeter, was arrested at Dubai airport on 5 May. He says he is innocent and was in the country conducting research on the UAE’s security strategy for his PhD thesis, but prosecutors claimed he confessed to charges.

Tejada told BBC Breakfast her conversations with her husband had been closely monitored so there was a limit to what she could tell him of the efforts to secure his release.

“I tried to reassure him and to tell him that he had 10 times as much support as before,” Tejada said.

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Hedges has been in a UAE prison for more than six months. He went to the UAE to research his thesis and was sentenced at a court in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday in a hearing that lasted less than five minutes, with no lawyer present.

Academics have said Hedges may have inadvertently put himself at risk by his “sharp analysis” of the UAE’s shifting security politics. The country presents itself as a modernising, socially liberal force in the Gulf, but dissent is repressed.

Chris Davidson, a former reader in Middle East politics and a fellow at Durham University, who helped supervise Hedges’s research, said: “The overall flavour [of his research] was actually sympathetic to the UAE – very objective, well-sourced. It was not intending to cause any difficulties.”

He added: “Everything that I read would have been absolutely of no use to an intelligence agency. There was nothing classified. It was all public domain [information]. [There was] no suggestion to me that he may have been surreptitiously working for an intelligence agency at the same time.”