In June, the legal journalist Catherine Baksi profiled David Haigh in Times Law under the headline "I expected a James Bond type to get me out of jail". Behind the headline sits a serious, detailed piece of reporting on a decade-long campaign to destroy one man, and on its failure.
What The Times records
The profile sets out the arc in full: lured to Dubai in 2014 for what he was told was a routine meeting, arrested on arrival, held for nearly two years without a fair trial, tortured, and then pursued for a further decade through fake cases, fabricated criminal charges and a campaign of harassment that included death threats, surveillance and a phone hacked with state-grade Pegasus spyware. And it records the ending: in March 2025, the last of the claims against him were dismissed, by the English High Court and by the DIFC courts in Dubai. As The Times puts it, all of the claims were finally dismissed.
That sentence is the reason Dubai Watch exists in the form it does. Our co-founder did not read about the machinery of the UAE's justice system in a report. He was put through it: the bounced-cheque playbook, the cybercrime charges for a social media post, the travel bans, the state-aligned media smears. Every case Dubai Watch takes on is checked against that lived knowledge of how the system actually behaves, not how it advertises itself.
Why it matters for the people we help
Credibility is the currency of this work. When we tell a government, a journalist or a family that a detainee's charges are fabricated, the first question is always the same: how do you know? The answer, now recorded by the paper of record, is that the same machine was turned on our co-founder for more than ten years, and when it was finally tested in independent courts, every claim failed. A Scottish judge had already described him as "an honest, intelligent witness". The Washington Post reported the forensic evidence of Pegasus spyware on his phone. The Times has now put the whole record in one place.
It matters most for the cases still running. Zeynab Javadli, the ex-wife of a nephew of Dubai's ruler, remains trapped in Dubai: released on police bail after eight days in a national security jail, but under a travel ban, her three young daughters still not returned to her. Her case runs on exactly the machinery the profile describes, and it is being fought with exactly the tool the profile vindicates: sustained, factual, international press attention. In places like Dubai, it is often the media, and only the media, that stands between a vulnerable person and disappearance.
Read the full story
David has written his own account of what a decade of Times reporting has meant, from his cell in Dubai to the courtroom victories of 2025, on his personal site: Time for The Times: how the paper of record chronicled a decade of my fight for justice. The original Times Law profile is at thetimes.com.
The record, in one line
Every claim brought against David Haigh was dismissed by the English High Court and the DIFC courts in Dubai in March 2025. The complete court record is set out at davidhaigh.co.uk/the-record.
Sources: Catherine Baksi, "David Haigh: I expected a James Bond type to get me out of jail", Times Law, The Times, 24 June 2026; David Haigh, "Time for The Times", davidhaigh.co.uk, 29 July 2026; "Ex-wife of Dubai ruler's nephew missing, says lawyer", BBC News, 4 June 2026; Dubai Watch case files.
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