An academic freed after spending months in a foreign jail over spying charges has reported his captors to the United Nations.
Durham University PHD student Matthew spent more than six months in solitary confinement and had been sentenced to life behind bars in the United Arab Emirates after being accused of spying for M16.
He says he was never physically assaulted but spent months completely isolated and claims he was threatened with torture, f orce-fed drugs and interrogated for hours on end .
The then 31-year-old said he was pressured into signing a false confession, admitting spying for MI6, before he was pardonned.
Despite his release, UAE officials stood by their claims that the researcher was a spy, and he and his wife Daniela Tejada have said they're still hoping to clear his name .
Now, the student has written to the United Nations' commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, to complain about treatment which, he says, breached his human rights.
He told The Guardian : "I was simply doing legitimate academic research and now I have to carry the weight of the torture that I endured and of the false conviction that was given to me. I want to have hope in humanity – to know that justice can be achieved – and to move on with my life and focus on my future.
"No one, let alone an innocent person, should have to go through what I did, and I can only hope that complaints like this make the UAE reconsider the human rights abuses that have become a regular feature of life in the country, especially for those other innocent people still in detention there."
His lawyer asked the UN's working group on arbitrary detention to investigate the case, asking the international body to "come to Matthew’s aid and safeguard his human rights".
His complaint include "prolonged solitary confinement", "psychological torture" and "physical harm".
Matthew also claims the UK Foreign Office failed to provide enough support, which, "continues to negatively affect his ability to recover from the human rights abuses that he suffered". Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt his department's intervention in the case was "very effective".
He was arrested at Dubai airport on May 5, 2018, while travelling to the country to interview a source for his PHD thesis. In November, he was sentenced to life imprisonment after a hearing of just five minutes, but on November 26 a pardon was issued.
He says that, ever since, he has suffered "daily bouts of anxiety, sleepless nights and deep episodes of depression".
