Background
Hawley is a daughter of British diplomat Sir Donald Hawley.
Hawley is a daughter of British diplomat Sir Donald Hawley.
She was educated at Wycombe Abbey School, an independent school for girls in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, followed by Oxford University where she studied Arabic and Persian.
Hawley began her career in journalism on Newsweek as the magazine"s Jerusalem correspondent from 1991 to 1994. She joined the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1994 working for the World Service as a newsroom journalist, before being posted to Cairo in 1999 and Jordan around 2001. While the British Broadcasting Corporation"s Baghdad correspondent, she was expelled from Iraq in 2002, but returned to the country after Saddam Hussein was removed from power the following year.
She was appointed the British Broadcasting Corporation Middle East correspondent at the beginning of 2006.
In recent years, she has reported on stories for the British Broadcasting Corporation"s Newsnight programme including an investigation into the sale of fake bomb detectors such as the ADE651 and GT200 to Iraq and other countries. That investigation led to a ban on United Kingdom exports of fake bomb detectors to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The owner of the company which made the GT200, Gary Bolton, was also convicted on 26 July 2013 on two charges of fraud and subsequently jailed for seven years.
