{"id":22996,"date":"2018-11-23T19:23:53","date_gmt":"2018-11-23T19:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=22996"},"modified":"2018-11-23T19:23:53","modified_gmt":"2018-11-23T19:23:53","slug":"what-does-the-matthew-hedges-case-tell-us-about-the-uae","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=22996","title":{"rendered":"What does the Matthew Hedges case tell us about the UAE?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article-body\" readability=\"89.7583697234\">\n<p>Matthew Hedges has spent the last seven months in prison in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/topics\/country\/united-arab-emirates.html\">United Arab Emirates<\/a>\u00a0and now he faces the prospect of staying there forever.<\/p>\n<p>The British PhD student was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/news\/2018\/11\/uae-appeals-court-sentences-matthew-hedges-life-prison-181121112518251.html\">given a life sentence<\/a> for spying on Wednesday by Abu Dhabi&#8217;s Federal Court of Appeals.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Hedges was studying for a doctorate on the Gulf country&#8217;s foreign and security policies at the time of his arrest.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The Emiratis say Hedges made a full confession, but his family says he did not understand the document he signed, which was written in Arabic.<\/p>\n<p>Government leaders in Abu Dhabi now say they&#8217;re <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/news\/2018\/11\/uae-hints-freeing-jailed-uk-academic-amicable-solution-181123121241686.html\">considering a request<\/a> from Hedges&#8217; wife for clemency.<\/p>\n<p>The story highlights an issue that has arisen repeatedly in different forms: the contrast between <span>the open, modern and tolerant image that the UAE, generally, and Dubai, in particular, seeks to project to the wider world, and\u00a0<\/span>what some see as the Emirates&#8217; narrow and conservative approach to security and public morality.<\/p>\n<p>Is the Hedges case just a major misunderstanding? Or evidence of a larger problem of academic and political freedom in the UAE?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Presenter:\u00a0<\/strong>Laura Kyle<\/p>\n<p><strong>Guests:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Glenmore Trenear-Harvey &#8211; Intelligence analyst, former MI6 intelligence officer\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Radha Stirling &#8211; Chief executive, Detained in Dubai campaign group<\/p>\n<p>Marc Owen Jones &#8211; Friend of Matthew Hedges and lecturer at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span>Source:<\/span>\u00a0<span>Al Jazeera News<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matthew Hedges has spent the last seven months in prison in the United Arab Emirates\u00a0and now he faces the prospect of staying there forever. The British PhD student was given a life sentence for spying on Wednesday by Abu Dhabi&#8217;s Federal Court of Appeals.\u00a0 Hedges was studying for a doctorate on the Gulf country&#8217;s foreign&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":22997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}