The United Arab Emirates said Friday it had pardoned an Egyptian poet and dissident, days after he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a case that drew scrutiny from human rights experts over the Gulf state’s efforts to punish critics beyond its borders.
The dissident, Abdulrahman al-Qaradawi, was pardoned by the Emirati president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, according to state media. The authorities did not immediately specify when Mr. al-Qaradawi, who had been held for months without trial, would be released.
The Emirati government previously told The New York Times that Mr. al-Qaradawi was being investigated on charges of “engaging in activities that aim to undermine public security” and that his detention complied with legal and human rights standards.
He was convicted on Aug. 27 on those charges, and fined 200,000 dirhams, about $54,000, state media said.
The unusual case of Mr. al-Qaradawi, an anti-authoritarian activist, had attracted international attention when the Lebanese authorities arrested him in December 2024 and extradited him to the Emirates, after he criticized the country on social media.
Mr. al-Qaradawi is not from the Emirates, a close U.S. ally, nor did he have any direct connection to the country. Human rights experts and his lawyers had warned that the case could set a dangerous precedent for governments seeking to silence critics across national borders.
Days before his arrest, Mr. al-Qaradawi, 54, had traveled to Syria, where rebels had recently toppled the dictator Bashar al-Assad in a lightning offensive.
In a video recorded there, the poet expressed hope that other autocratic rulers in the Middle East would also fall, and he sharply criticized the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, saying they would conspire against the new Syria.
Soon after, he was arrested by security forces in Lebanon as he crossed the Syrian border into the country.
His lawyer in Lebanon, Mohammad Sablouh, said that Egypt had sought his extradition first, but the Lebanese authorities had instead sent him to the Emirates. Lebanon’s interior ministry said last year that Mr. al-Qaradawi’s arrest and deportation were carried out under a previous caretaker government, and did not elaborate.
United Nations experts had warned that he could face torture, ill-treatment or enforced disappearance in the Emirates.
Egypt had issued a prison sentence in absentia for Mr. al-Qaradawi in 2016, on charges connected to speaking out against the Egyptian government.
Mr. al-Qaradawi is the son of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an influential Islamic scholar who spent decades in exile in Qatar and had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist movement that has been designated as a terrorist group by the Emirates.
The younger Mr. al-Qaradawi went into exile in Turkey about a decade ago in the wake of the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and obtained Turkish citizenship, building a large online following while advocating for greater political freedoms across the region.
His family and lawyers had repeatedly called for his release, and in August of last year his family filed a complaint with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention challenging his detention.
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