Why is the world’s biggest climate summit rolling out the red carpet for a war criminal?

The United Arab Emirates arrested academic Matthew Hedges on spurious charges in 2018, keeping him in solitary confinement for seven months. Little wonder, he writes, that this regime stooped to inviting Bashar al-Assad to Cop28

It is bad enough that the UAE is attempting to leverage Cop28 to improve its own reputation, let alone trying to cleanse that of Bashar al-Assad (UAE Presidential Court/Reuters)

News that the United Arab Emirates, this year hosting the United Nations’ Cop28, has extended Syrian dictator and war criminal Bashar al-Assad an invitation to the annual climate summit has shocked the world, but not me.

Amnesty International has described the decision as “a sick joke”; Human Rights Watch has branded it “outrageous”. The UK cannot be seen to be legitimising it.

The anger is to be expected. Assad’s brutal repression of Syria has resulted in one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern history. His reign of terror is marked by torture, disappearances and even chemical weapons attacks against his own people. Hundreds of thousands have died at the hands of his murderous government forces, the vast majority of them civilians.