New York City: Matthew and Grace Huang, a US couple entangled in Qatar’s criminal justice system over the death of their adopted daughter, have been denied permission to fly home while the appeal of their three-year prison term is pending, and their lawyers said they might be incarcerated as early as Friday.
The legal difficulties confronting the Huangs, who already spent nearly a year in a Qatar prison before being released last November, have been made more complicated by what their lawyers described as a lack of clarity over the verdict, announced on March 27 at the criminal court in Doha, the capital.
They were originally accused of murder, punishable under Qatari law by execution or a long prison term, but the precise charge used by the judge to decide their punishment was never disclosed.
The Huangs, from Los Angeles, have asserted their innocence in a case with misconceptions about adoption that rights advocates say has cast a negative light on Qatar.
The tiny but wealthy Gulf emirate is a close United States ally, home to one of the most important US military bases in the Middle East. The State Department has expressed concern about the fairness of the trial.
“At this point it’s inaccurate to think of this as a legal case because all due process for the accused has been ignored,” said Eric Volz, managing director of the David House Agency, a legal rights organisation in Los Angeles that assists Americans charged with wrongdoing overseas, who has been helping with the defence.
While the appellate court has accepted the intent to appeal, he said on Wednesday in a telephone interview, “We can’t even present an outline unless we know what the case is going to be.”
Volz said that a request by the Huangs to go back to Los Angeles while their appeal proceeds had been denied, and that the Huangs feared they could be rearrested on Friday, when the two-week window for submitting an intent to appeal expires. The first hearing on the appeal is scheduled for April 28.
It was also possible that they would not be rearrested, as long as they remained in Doha, but the courts have shown no consistency.
In another recent case, in which five people were convicted of negligence in a Doha nursery fire that killed 19 people, including 13 children, are all free pending their appeals.
The Huangs were not allowed to leave the country after their release from custody.
Efforts to reach the Qatar judiciary officials for clarity on the case were unsuccessful.
Matthew Huang, 37, and his wife, 36, had been living in Doha with their three children, two boys and a girl, all adopted from Africa, because Huang, an engineer, was working on an infrastructure project in preparation for the 2022 World Cup.
The parents were arrested in January 2013 after they took their unconscious daughter, Gloria, 8, to a hospital, asserting that she had refused food for four days because of an eating disorder not uncommon among adopted children from impoverished backgrounds. An autopsy by Qatari medical examiners concluded the child, who was extremely thin, had died from lack of nourishment.
Prosecutors accused the Huangs of killing her and initially described them as suspected child traffickers because Gloria had been adopted from Ghana, and the police could not fathom that parents of Asian heritage would have African children.
They were also suspicious because the Huangs had home-schooled the children, although that practice is not uncommon among Qatar’s large expatriate population.
Still, the judicial authorities eventually permitted the two other children to go home to the United States with Grace Huang’s mother, generating some optimism that the prosecution’s case was unravelling. The defence also produced strong character witnesses for the Huangs and evidence that challenged the autopsy, including what appeared to be a fabricated pathology report.
The Huangs had bought airplane tickets to fly home on the anticipation that their case would be dismissed two weeks ago, and they called the guilty verdict a grievous miscarriage of justice. Matthew Huang said in a statement that the ruling “appears to be nothing more than an effort to save face.”
People with knowledge of the case said that the US ambassador, Susan L. Ziadeh, had met with representatives of the Qatar attorney general’s office earlier in the week seeking to have the travel ban on the Huangs rescinded, but that the request was denied.
Efforts to contact the embassy for comment were referred to the State Department, where an official said in a statement: “We are continuing to follow this case closely. Senior US government officials have raised this case with the government of Qatar on multiple occasions, and we will continue to engage Qatari officials at the highest levels.”
— New York Times News Service
