About David
Few people can say they have advised a hostage princess, run one of the biggest clubs in English football, survived one of the world's most brutal jails, and won a ten-year fight to clear their own name. David Haigh has done all four, and he did not merely live to tell it: he turned what was done to him into a life spent helping others.
David Haigh is an international human rights lawyer, crisis manager, writer and broadcaster: one of the most prominent and respected voices on injustice in Dubai and the wider UAE, and a leading authority on lifting abusive Interpol red notices. He has practised at the highest levels of law and finance around the world, in the UK, the Caribbean, and across the Gulf in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain. He began at a leading Mayfair firm, moved to two of the largest law firms on earth, Britain's DLA Piper and America's Akin Gump, and to global institutions including Barclays, BNY Mellon and Citco. By his late twenties he was chief operating officer, and then one of the youngest deputy chief executives, of a major Islamic investment banking group, structuring the world's first wholly Islamic-finance takeover of an English football club, Leeds United. At 34 he became the club's managing director: the youngest, and the first openly gay MD, in top-flight English football.
Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Lured back to Dubai in 2014, he found its weak and corrupt courts, police and prosecutors turned against him. He endured 22 months of arbitrary detention and torture. His account of that treatment has been accepted in full by a UK court.
Since his release in 2016, his life's work has been Britons and others facing injustice abroad, including members of Dubai's ruling family itself. He was lawyer and crisis manager to HRH Princess (Sheikha) Latifa Al Maktoum and co-founded the global #FreeLatifa campaign; he assisted the legal teams behind HRH Princess Haya's landmark GBP 554 million High Court case; he advised Sheikha Randa Al Banna, the ruler's first wife, on decades of abuse; and he has quietly counselled many other Dubai and Saudi royals whose cases have never been made public. Today he stands with Zeynab Javadli, former wife of the ruler's nephew, in the fight for her three daughters, and with countless others, from wronged tourists to a billionaire and a leading energy executive.
He is, by reputation, the human rights lawyer the government of Dubai and the wider UAE has most reason to fear. He is feared because he wins: because he brings justice to the clients and the strangers he takes on, and because he commands a platform, forged in the glare of English football and sharpened across a decade of television, that can turn the world's cameras on the abuses the Emirates would rather keep in the dark. He is feared, above all, because he understands the machinery from the inside.
David Haigh is co-founder of Dubai Watch and founder of Detained International.